{"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/slimmed-asymmetrical-contrastive-learning-and","title":"Slimmed Asymmetrical Contrastive Learning and Cross Distillation for Lightweight Model Training","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2023-09-21","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2023 11","authors":[],"abstract":"Contrastive learning (CL) has been widely investigated with various learning mechanisms and achieves strong capability in learning representations of data in a self-supervised manner using unlabeled data. A common fashion of contrastive learning on this line is employing mega-sized encoders to achieve comparable performance as the supervised learning counterpart. Despite the success of the labelless training, current contrastive learning algorithms *failed* to achieve good performance with lightweight (compact) models, e.g., MobileNet, while the requirements of the heavy encoders impede the energy-efficient computation, especially for resource-constrained AI applications. Motivated by this, we propose a new self-supervised CL scheme, named SACL-XD, consisting of two technical components, **S**limmed **A**symmetrical **C**ontrastive **L**earning (SACL) and **Cross**-**D**istillation (XD), which collectively enable efficient CL with compact models. While relevant prior works employed a strong pre-trained model as the teacher of unsupervised knowledge distillation to a lightweight encoder, our proposed method trains CL models from scratch and outperforms them even without such an expensive requirement. Compared to the SoTA lightweight CL training (distillation) algorithms, SACL-XD achieves 1.79% ImageNet-1K accuracy improvement on MobileNet-V3 with 64$\\times$ training FLOPs reduction.","url_abs":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=mOVEJletyD","url_pdf":"https://openreview.net/pdf?id=mOVEJletyD","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":"slimmed-asymmetrical-contrastive-learning-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/mengjian0502/sacl-xd","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}