Papers › Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding

Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding

22 May 2019ICML 2020 1arXiv:1905.09272archive 2025-07-28

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

Human observers can learn to recognize new categories of images from a handful of examples, yet doing so with artificial ones remains an open challenge. We hypothesize that data-efficient recognition is enabled by representations which make the variability in natural signals more predictable. We therefore revisit and improve Contrastive Predictive Coding, an unsupervised objective for learning such representations. This new implementation produces features which support state-of-the-art linear classification accuracy on the ImageNet dataset. When used as input for non-linear classification with deep neural networks, this representation allows us to use 2-5x less labels than classifiers trained directly on image pixels. Finally, this unsupervised representation substantially improves transfer learning to object detection on the PASCAL VOC dataset, surpassing fully supervised pre-trained ImageNet classifiers.

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SeonghoBaek/CPC mentioned on GitHubtf report
philip-bachman/amdim-public mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Contrastive LearningGeneral ClassificationObject DetectionSelf-Supervised Image ClassificationSemi-Supervised Image ClassificationTransfer Learningobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Contrastive Learning imagenet-1k ResNet50 (v2) ImageNet Top-1 Accuracy 63.8 #6 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Contrastive Learning imagenet-1k ResNet v2 101 ImageNet Top-1 Accuracy 48.7 #14 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-161) (arxiv v2) Number of Params 305M #98 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-161) (arxiv v2) Top 1 Accuracy 71.5% #98 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-161) (arxiv v2) Top 5 Accuracy 90.1% #98 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-50) (arxiv v2) Number of Params 24M #115 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-50) (arxiv v2) Top 1 Accuracy 63.8% #115 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-50) (arxiv v2) Top 5 Accuracy 85.3% #115 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-161) (arxiv v1) Number of Params 305M #121 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-161) (arxiv v1) Top 1 Accuracy 61.0% #121 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet CPC v2 (ResNet-161) (arxiv v1) Top 5 Accuracy 83.0% #121 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet - 10% labeled data CPC v2 (ResNet-161) Top 1 Accuracy 73.1% #37 of 75 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet - 10% labeled data CPC v2 (ResNet-161) Top 5 Accuracy 91.2% #37 of 75 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Introduced by this paper: CPC v2

1x1 ConvolutionAdamAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockCPC v2Contrastive Predictive CodingConvolutionDropoutFaster R-CNNGlobal Average PoolingInfoNCEKaiming InitializationLayer NormalizationMax PoolingRPNRandom Horizontal FlipRandom Resized CropReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionRoIPoolSoftmaxWeight Decay

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