Go to ICLR 2025 Conference homepage$\mathbb{X}$-Sample Contrastive Loss: Improving Contrastive Learning with Sample Similarity Graphs
Learning good representations involves capturing the diverse ways in which data samples relate. Contrastive loss—an objective matching related samples—underlies methods from self-supervised to multimodal learning. Contrastive losses, however, can be viewed more broadly as modifying a similarity graph to indicate how samples should relate in the embedding space. This view reveals a shortcoming in contrastive learning: the similarity graph is binary, as only one sample is the related positive sample. Crucially, similarities \textit{across} samples are ignored. Based on this observation, we revise the standard contrastive loss to explicitly encode how a sample relates to others. We experiment with this new objective, called $\mathbb{X}$-Sample Contrastive, to train vision models based on similarities in class or text caption descriptions. Our study spans three scales: ImageNet-1k with 1 million, CC3M with 3 million, and CC12M with 12 million samples. The representations learned via our objective outperform both contrastive self-supervised and vision-language models trained on the same data across a range of tasks. When training on CC12M, we outperform CLIP by $0.6%$ on both ImageNet and ImageNet Real. Our objective appears to work particularly well in lower-data regimes, with gains over CLIP of $17.2%$ on ImageNet and $18.0%$ on ImageNet Real when training with CC3M. Finally, our objective encourages the model to learn representations that separate objects from their attributes and backgrounds, with gains of $3.3$-$5.6$% over CLIP on ImageNet9. The proposed method takes a step towards developing richer learning objectives for understanding sample relations in foundation models.