{"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/pcl-peer-contrastive-learning-with-diverse","title":"PCL: Peer-Contrastive Learning with Diverse Augmentations for Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings","arxiv_id":"2201.12093","date":"2022-01-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Qiyu Wu","Chongyang Tao","Tao Shen","Can Xu","Xiubo Geng","Daxin Jiang"],"abstract":"Learning sentence embeddings in an unsupervised manner is fundamental in natural language processing. Recent common practice is to couple pre-trained language models with unsupervised contrastive learning, whose success relies on augmenting a sentence with a semantically-close positive instance to construct contrastive pairs. Nonetheless, existing approaches usually depend on a mono-augmenting strategy, which causes learning shortcuts towards the augmenting biases and thus corrupts the quality of sentence embeddings. A straightforward solution is resorting to more diverse positives from a multi-augmenting strategy, while an open question remains about how to unsupervisedly learn from the diverse positives but with uneven augmenting qualities in the text field. As one answer, we propose a novel Peer-Contrastive Learning (PCL) with diverse augmentations. PCL constructs diverse contrastive positives and negatives at the group level for unsupervised sentence embeddings. PCL performs peer-positive contrast as well as peer-network cooperation, which offers an inherent anti-bias ability and an effective way to learn from diverse augmentations. Experiments on STS benchmarks verify the effectiveness of PCL against its competitors in unsupervised sentence embeddings.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12093v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12093v2.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":"pcl-peer-contrastive-learning-with-diverse","repo_url":"https://github.com/qiyuw/peercl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"open-question","task_name":"Open-Ended Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"sts","task_name":"STS"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"},{"task_slug":"sentence-embeddings","task_name":"Sentence Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2201.12093","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}