Exploring Balanced Feature Spaces for Representation Learning

Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods are mostly applied for training representation models from artificially balanced datasets (e.g., ImageNet). It is unclear how well they will perform in the practical scenarios where datasets are often imbalanced w.r.t. the classes. Motivated by this question, we conduct a series of studies on the performance of self-supervised contrastive learning and supervised learning methods over multiple datasets where training instance distributions vary from a balanced one to a long-tailed one. Our findings are quite intriguing. Different from supervised methods with large performance drop, the self-supervised contrastive learning methods perform stably well even when the datasets are heavily imbalanced. This motivates us to explore the balanced feature spaces learned by contrastive learning, where the feature representations present similar linear separability w.r.t. all the classes. Our further experiments reveal that a representation model generating a balanced feature space can generalize better than that yielding an imbalanced one across multiple settings. Inspired by these insights, we develop a novel representation learning method, called $k$-positive contrastive learning. It effectively combines strengths of the supervised method and the contrastive learning method to learn representations that are both discriminative and balanced. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority on multiple recognition tasks. Remarkably, it achieves new state-of-the-art on challenging long-tailed recognition benchmarks. Code and models will be released.