Papers › Towards Fine-grained Visual Representations by Combining Contrastive Learning with...

Towards Fine-grained Visual Representations by Combining Contrastive Learning with Image Reconstruction and Attention-weighted Pooling

9 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.04323archive 2025-07-28

Jonas Dippel, Steffen Vogler, Johannes Höhne

This paper presents Contrastive Reconstruction, ConRec - a self-supervised learning algorithm that obtains image representations by jointly optimizing a contrastive and a self-reconstruction loss. We showcase that state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods (e.g. SimCLR) have shortcomings to capture fine-grained visual features in their representations. ConRec extends the SimCLR framework by adding (1) a self-reconstruction task and (2) an attention mechanism within the contrastive learning task. This is accomplished by applying a simple encoder-decoder architecture with two heads. We show that both extensions contribute towards an improved vector representation for images with fine-grained visual features. Combining those concepts, ConRec outperforms SimCLR and SimCLR with Attention-Pooling on fine-grained classification datasets.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

bayer-science-for-a-better-life/contrastive-reconstruction officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfGPL-3.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Contrastive LearningDecoderImage ReconstructionSelf-Supervised Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockColorJitterContrastive LearningConvolutionDense ConnectionsFeedforward NetworkGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingNT-XentRandom Gaussian BlurRandom Resized CropReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionSimCLR

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections