Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding

Olivier J Henaff, Aravind Srinivas, Jeffrey De Fauw, Ali Razavi, Carl Doersch, S. M. Ali Eslami, Aaron van den Oord

TL;DR: Unsupervised representations learned with Contrastive Predictive Coding enable data-efficient image classification.

Abstract: Human observers can learn to recognize new categories of objects from a handful of examples, yet doing so with machine perception remains an open challenge. We hypothesize that data-efficient recognition is enabled by representations which make the variability in natural signals more predictable, as suggested by recent perceptual evidence. We therefore revisit and improve Contrastive Predictive Coding, a recently-proposed unsupervised learning framework, and arrive at a representation which enables generalization from small amounts of labeled data. When provided with only 1% of ImageNet labels (i.e. 13 per class), this model retains a strong classification performance, 73% Top-5 accuracy, outperforming supervised networks by 28% (a 65% relative improvement) and state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by 14%. We also find this representation to serve as a useful substrate for object detection on the PASCAL-VOC 2007 dataset, approaching the performance of representations trained with a fully annotated ImageNet dataset.

Keywords: Deep learning, representation learning, contrastive methods, unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning, vision, data-efficiency

Community Implementations: [ 5 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1905.09272/code)