Papers › Ranking Info Noise Contrastive Estimation: Boosting Contrastive Learning via Ranked Positives

Ranking Info Noise Contrastive Estimation: Boosting Contrastive Learning via Ranked Positives

27 Jan 2022arXiv:2201.11736archive 2025-07-28

David T. Hoffmann, Nadine Behrmann, Juergen Gall, Thomas Brox, Mehdi Noroozi

This paper introduces Ranking Info Noise Contrastive Estimation (RINCE), a new member in the family of InfoNCE losses that preserves a ranked ordering of positive samples. In contrast to the standard InfoNCE loss, which requires a strict binary separation of the training pairs into similar and dissimilar samples, RINCE can exploit information about a similarity ranking for learning a corresponding embedding space. We show that the proposed loss function learns favorable embeddings compared to the standard InfoNCE whenever at least noisy ranking information can be obtained or when the definition of positives and negatives is blurry. We demonstrate this for a supervised classification task with additional superclass labels and noisy similarity scores. Furthermore, we show that RINCE can also be applied to unsupervised training with experiments on unsupervised representation learning from videos. In particular, the embedding yields higher classification accuracy, retrieval rates and performs better in out-of-distribution detection than the standard InfoNCE loss.

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ContrastiveRanking boschresearch/rince/losses.py official repository ran AGPL-3.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · 335473f8fe1564f5 · report
ContrastiveRankingLoss boschresearch/rince/losses.py official repository unverified AGPL-3.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · 25c96eaf975d39fd · report

Tasks

Contrastive LearningOut-of-Distribution DetectionRepresentation LearningRetrieval

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Methods

INFOInfoNCE

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