Contrastive learning for object detection

Abstract

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for training a neural network using contrastive learning. One of the methods includes obtaining a network input representing an environment; processing the network input using a first subnetwork of the neural network to generate a respective embedding for each location in the environment; processing the embeddings for each location in the environment using a second subnetwork of the neural network to generate a respective object prediction for each location; determining, for each of a plurality of pairs of the plurality of locations in the environment, whether the respective object predictions of the pair of locations characterize the same possible object or different possible objects; computing a respective contrastive loss value for each of the plurality of pairs of locations; and updating values for a plurality of parameters of the first subnetwork using the computed contrastive loss values.