{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/can-contrastive-learning-avoid-shortcut","title":"Can contrastive learning avoid shortcut solutions?","arxiv_id":"2106.11230","date":"2021-06-21","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Joshua Robinson","Li Sun","Ke Yu","Kayhan Batmanghelich","Stefanie Jegelka","Suvrit Sra"],"abstract":"The generalization of representations learned via contrastive learning depends crucially on what features of the data are extracted. However, we observe that the contrastive loss does not always sufficiently guide which features are extracted, a behavior that can negatively impact the performance on downstream tasks via \"shortcuts\", i.e., by inadvertently suppressing important predictive features. We find that feature extraction is influenced by the difficulty of the so-called instance discrimination task (i.e., the task of discriminating pairs of similar points from pairs of dissimilar ones). Although harder pairs improve the representation of some features, the improvement comes at the cost of suppressing previously well represented features. In response, we propose implicit feature modification (IFM), a method for altering positive and negative samples in order to guide contrastive models towards capturing a wider variety of predictive features. Empirically, we observe that IFM reduces feature suppression, and as a result improves performance on vision and medical imaging tasks. The code is available at: \\url{https://github.com/joshr17/IFM}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11230v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.11230v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"can-contrastive-learning-avoid-shortcut","repo_url":"https://github.com/joshr17/IFM","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.11230","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2106.11230"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/joshr17/IFM","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"983576fa67f4f01e","entry":"accuracy","repo":"joshr17/IFM","repo_kind":"official","path":"moco-master/main_moco.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joshr17/IFM/blob/HEAD/moco-master/main_moco.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"983576fa67f4f01e"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"eda939c58b510326","entry":"MoCo","repo":"joshr17/IFM","repo_kind":"official","path":"moco-master/moco/adv_builder.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joshr17/IFM/blob/HEAD/moco-master/moco/adv_builder.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"eda939c58b510326"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}