Interventional Contrastive Learning with Meta Semantic Regularizer

Abstract

Contrastive learning (CL)-based self-supervised learning models learn visual representations in a pairwise manner. Although the prevailing CL model has achieved great progress, in this paper, we uncover an ever-overlooked phenomenon: When the CL model is trained with full images, the performance tested in full images is better than that in foreground areas; when the CL model is trained with foreground areas, the performance tested in full images is worse than that in foreground areas. This observation reveals that backgrounds in images may interfere with the model learning semantic information and their influence has not been fully eliminated. To tackle this issue, we build a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to model the background as a confounder. We propose a backdoor adjustment-based regularization method, namely