The Bad Batches: Enhancing Self-Supervised Learning in Image Classification Through Representative Batch Curation

Abstract: The pursuit of learning robust representations without human supervision is a longstanding challenge. The recent advancements in self-supervised contrastive learning approaches have demonstrated high performance across various representation learning challenges. However, current methods depend on the random transformation of training examples, resulting in some cases of unrepresentative positive pairs that can have a large impact on learning. This limitation not only impedes the convergence of the learning process but the robustness of the learnt representation as well as requiring larger batch sizes to improve robustness to such bad batches. This paper attempts to alleviate the influence of false positive and false negative pairs by employing pairwise similarity calculations through the Fr\'echet ResNet Distance (FRD), thereby obtaining robust representations from unlabelled data. The effectiveness of the proposed method is substantiated by empirical results, where a linear classifier trained on self-supervised contrastive representations achieved an impressive 87.74\% top-1 accuracy on STL10 and 99.31\% on the Flower102 dataset. These results emphasize the potential of the proposed approach in pushing the boundaries of the state-of-the-art in self-supervised contrastive learning, particularly for image classification tasks.