SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives

Jiahao Xu, Wei Shao, Lihui Chen, Lemao Liu


Abstract
This paper improves contrastive learning for sentence embeddings from two perspectives: handling dropout noise and addressing feature corruption. Specifically, for the first perspective, we identify that the dropout noise from negative pairs affects the model’s performance. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective method to deal with such type of noise. Secondly, we pinpoint the rank bottleneck of current solutions to feature corruption and propose a dimension-wise contrastive learning objective to address this issue. Both proposed methods are generic and can be applied to any contrastive learning based models for sentence embeddings. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that combining both proposed methods leads to a gain of 1.8 points compared to the strong baseline SimCSE configured with BERT base. Furthermore, applying the proposed method to DiffCSE, another strong contrastive learning based baseline, results in a gain of 1.4 points.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.737
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12028–12040
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.737
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.737
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiahao Xu, Wei Shao, Lihui Chen, and Lemao Liu. 2023. SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12028–12040, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives (Xu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.737.pdf
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