Implicit Contrastive Representation Learning with Guided Stop-gradient

In self-supervised representation learning, Siamese networks are a natural architecture for learning transformation-invariance by bringing representations of positive pairs closer together. But it is prone to collapse into a degenerate solution. To address the issue, in contrastive learning, a contrastive loss is used to prevent collapse by moving representations of negative pairs away from each other. But it is known that algorithms with negative sampling are not robust to a reduction in the number of negative samples. So, on the other hand, there are algorithms that do not use negative pairs. Many positive-only algorithms adopt asymmetric network architecture consisting of source and target encoders as a key factor in coping with collapse. By exploiting the asymmetric architecture, we introduce a methodology to implicitly incorporate the idea of contrastive learning. As its implementation, we present a novel method guided stop-gradient. We apply our method to benchmark algorithms SimSiam and BYOL and show that our method stabilizes training and boosts performance. We also show that the algorithms with our method work well with small batch sizes and do not collapse even when there is no predictor. The code is available at https://github.com/bych-lee/gsg.