This repo contains the code used in paper Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning.

@article{Jing2021UnderstandingDC,
  title={Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning},
  author={Li Jing and Pascal Vincent and Yann LeCun and Yuandong Tian},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.09348},
  year={2021}
}

We viaulize the embedding space spectrum of a pretrained SimCLR model.

The spectrum is generated by spectrum.py.

How to use:

python spectrum.py --data <path-to-imagenet-data> --checkpoint <path-to-checkpoint> --projector

We show that 2 reasons (strong augmentaiton and implicit regularization) cause dimensional collapse in contrastive learning via toy tasks. Please see toy_tasks.

DirectCLR is a simple contrastive learning model for visual representation learning. It does not require a trainable projector as SimCLR. It is able to prevent dimensional collapse and outperform SimCLR with a linear projector.

For training / evaluation detail, please see diretclr.

This project is under the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. See LICENSE for details.