# Contrastive Order Learning: A General Framework for Ordinal Regression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08109/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 110 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [Snapshot Ensembles: Train 1, get M for free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00109/) (2017)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)
- [From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/) (2019)
- [Massive Online Crowdsourced Study of Subjective and Objective Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02919/) (2015)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00375/) (2019)
- [Delving into Deep Imbalanced Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09554/) (2021)
- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Single Image Depth Estimation: Toward Higher Resolution Maps with Accurate Object Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08673/) (2018)
- [UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14354/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Blind Image Quality Assessment in the Laboratory and Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13983/) (2020)
- [A Deep Learning based No-reference Quality Assessment Model for UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14047/) (2022)
- [Large-Scale Study of Perceptual Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01761/) (2018)
- [YouTube UGC Dataset for Video Compression Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06457/) (2019)
- [It's Written All Over Your Face: Full-Face Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08860/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose contrastive order learning (ConOrd), a contrastive learning framework for ordinal regression that integrates the strengths of contrastive learning and order learning. While contrastive learning effectively leverages all samples in a batch, it typically ignores the inherent ordering among rank labels. Conversely, order learning explicitly models label ordinality but often relies on local, margin-based comparisons, limiting its ability to capture global ordinal structure. ConOrd addresses these limitations by introducing a contrastive order loss with soft affinity and disparity weights based on rank differences, enabling fine-grained modeling of ordinal relationships across all sample pairs within a batch. Extensive experiments on a range of ordinal regression tasks, including facial age estimation, blind image quality assessment, and blind video quality assessment, demonstrate that ConOrd consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes well across diverse ordinal regression scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/cwlee00/ConOrd.