Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations

This paper presents Prototypical Contrastive Learning (PCL), an unsupervised representation learning method that addresses the fundamental limitations of the popular instance-wise contrastive learning. PCL implicitly encodes semantic structures of the data into the learned embedding space, and prevents the network from solely relying on low-level cues for solving unsupervised learning tasks. Specifically, we introduce prototypes as latent variables to help find the maximum-likelihood estimation of the network parameters in an Expectation-Maximization framework. We iteratively perform E-step as finding the distribution of prototypes via clustering and M-step as optimizing the network via contrastive learning. We propose ProtoNCE loss, a generalized version of the InfoNCE loss for contrastive learning by encouraging representations to be closer to their assigned prototypes. PCL achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple unsupervised representation learning benchmarks, with >10% accuracy improvement in low-resource transfer tasks.