title: Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding
abstract: Human observers can learn to recognize new categories of objects from a handful of examples, yet doing so with machine perception remains an open challenge. We hypothesize that data-efficient recognition is enabled by representations which make the variability in natural signals more predictable, as suggested by recent perceptual evidence. We therefore revisit and improve Contrastive Predictive Coding, a recently-proposed unsupervised learning framework, and arrive at a representation which enables generalization from small amounts of labeled data. When provided with only 1% of ImageNet labels (i.e. 13 per class), this model retains a strong classification performance, 73% Top-5 accuracy, outperforming supervised networks by 28% (a 65% relative improvement) and state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by 14%. We also find this representation to serve as a useful substrate for object detection on the PASCAL-VOC 2007 dataset, approaching the performance of representations trained with a fully annotated ImageNet dataset.
authors: Olivier J Henaff Aravind Srinivas Jeffrey De Fauw Ali Razavi Carl Doersch S. M. Ali Eslami Aaron van den Oord
hIndex: Aaron van den Oord 35