No Arabic abstract
As a subset of unsupervised representation learning, self-supervised representation learning adopts self-defined signals as supervision and uses the learned representation for downstream tasks, such as object detection and image captioning. Many proposed approaches for self-supervised learning follow naturally a multi-view perspective, where the input (e.g., original images) and the self-supervised signals (e.g., augmented images) can be seen as two redundant views of the data. Building from this multi-view perspective, this paper provides an information-theoretical framework to better understand the properties that encourage successful self-supervised learning. Specifically, we demonstrate that self-supervised learned representations can extract task-relevant information and discard task-irrelevant information. Our theoretical framework paves the way to a larger space of self-supervised learning objective design. In particular, we propose a composite objective that bridges the gap between prior contrastive and predictive learning objectives, and introduce an additional objective term to discard task-irrelevant information. To verify our analysis, we conduct controlled experiments to evaluate the impact of the composite objectives. We also explore our frameworks empirical generalization beyond the multi-view perspective, where the cross-view redundancy may not be clearly observed.
As a newly emerging unsupervised learning paradigm, self-supervised learning (SSL) recently gained widespread attention, which usually introduces a pretext task without manual annotation of data. With its help, SSL effectively learns the feature representation beneficial for downstream tasks. Thus the pretext task plays a key role. However, the study of its design, especially its essence currently is still open. In this paper, we borrow a multi-view perspective to decouple a class of popular pretext tasks into a combination of view data augmentation (VDA) and view label classification (VLC), where we attempt to explore the essence of such pretext task while providing some insights into its design. Specifically, a simple multi-view learning framework is specially designed (SSL-MV), which assists the feature learning of downstream tasks (original view) through the same tasks on the augmented views. SSL-MV focuses on VDA while abandons VLC, empirically uncovering that it is VDA rather than generally considered VLC that dominates the performance of such SSL. Additionally, thanks to replacing VLC with VDA tasks, SSL-MV also enables an integrated inference combining the predictions from the augmented views, further improving the performance. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate its advantages.
Self-supervised metric learning has been a successful approach for learning a distance from an unlabeled dataset. The resulting distance is broadly useful for improving various distance-based downstream tasks, even when no information from downstream tasks is utilized in the metric learning stage. To gain insights into this approach, we develop a statistical framework to theoretically study how self-supervised metric learning can benefit downstream tasks in the context of multi-view data. Under this framework, we show that the target distance of metric learning satisfies several desired properties for the downstream tasks. On the other hand, our investigation suggests the target distance can be further improved by moderating each directions weights. In addition, our analysis precisely characterizes the improvement by self-supervised metric learning on four commonly used downstream tasks: sample identification, two-sample testing, $k$-means clustering, and $k$-nearest neighbor classification. As a by-product, we propose a simple spectral method for self-supervised metric learning, which is computationally efficient and minimax optimal for estimating target distance. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to support the theoretical results in the paper.
While neural networks for learning representation of multi-view data have been previously proposed as one of the state-of-the-art multi-view dimension reduction techniques, how to make the representation discriminative with only a small amount of labeled data is not well-studied. We introduce a semi-supervised neural network model, named Multi-view Discriminative Neural Network (MDNN), for multi-view problems. MDNN finds nonlinear view-specific mappings by projecting samples to a common feature space using multiple coupled deep networks. It is capable of leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data to project multi-view data so that samples from different classes are separated and those from the same class are clustered together. It also uses the inter-view correlation between views to exploit the available information in both the labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for multi-view semi-supervised learning.
Multi-view clustering is an important research topic due to its capability to utilize complementary information from multiple views. However, there are few methods to consider the negative impact caused by certain views with unclear clustering structures, resulting in poor multi-view clustering performance. To address this drawback, we propose self-supervised discriminative feature learning for deep multi-view clustering (SDMVC). Concretely, deep autoencoders are applied to learn embedded features for each view independently. To leverage the multi-view complementary information, we concatenate all views embedded features to form the global features, which can overcome the negative impact of some views unclear clustering structures. In a self-supervised manner, pseudo-labels are obtained to build a unified target distribution to perform multi-view discriminative feature learning. During this process, global discriminative information can be mined to supervise all views to learn more discriminative features, which in turn are used to update the target distribution. Besides, this unified target distribution can make SDMVC learn consistent cluster assignments, which accomplishes the clustering consistency of multiple views while preserving their features diversity. Experiments on various types of multi-view datasets show that SDMVC achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Multi-typed objects Multi-view Multi-instance Multi-label Learning (M4L) deals with interconnected multi-typed objects (or bags) that are made of diverse instances, represented with heterogeneous feature views and annotated with a set of non-exclusive but semantically related labels. M4L is more general and powerful than the typical Multi-view Multi-instance Multi-label Learning (M3L), which only accommodates single-typed bags and lacks the power to jointly model the naturally interconnected multi-typed objects in the physical world. To combat with this novel and challenging learning task, we develop a joint matrix factorization based solution (M4L-JMF). Particularly, M4L-JMF firstly encodes the diverse attributes and multiple inter(intra)-associations among multi-typed bags into respective data matrices, and then jointly factorizes these matrices into low-rank ones to explore the composite latent representation of each bag and its instances (if any). In addition, it incorporates a dispatch and aggregation term to distribute the labels of bags to individual instances and reversely aggregate the labels of instances to their affiliated bags in a coherent manner. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that M4L-JMF achieves significantly better results than simple adaptions of existing M3L solutions on this novel problem.