Supervised Stochastic Neighbor Embedding Using Contrastive Learning

Abstract: Stochastic neighbor embedding (SNE) methods $t$-SNE, UMAP are two most popular dimensionality reduction methods for data visualization. Contrastive learning, especially self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL), has showed great success in embedding features from unlabeled data. The conceptual connection between SNE and SSCL has been exploited. In this work, within the scope of preserving neighboring information of a dataset, we extend the self-supervised contrastive approach to the fully-supervised setting, allowing us to effectively leverage label information. Clusters of samples belonging to the same class are pulled together in low-dimensional embedding space, while simultaneously pushing apart clusters of samples from different classes.