Contrastive Learning has recently received interest due to its success in self-supervised representation learning in the computer vision domain. However, the origins of Contrastive Learning date as far back as the 1990s and its development has spanned across many fields and domains including Metric Learning and natural language processing. In this paper we provide a comprehensive literature review and we propose a general Contrastive Representation Learning framework that simplifies and unifies many different contrastive learning methods. We also provide a taxonomy for each of the components of contrastive learning in order to summarise it and distinguish it from other forms of machine learning. We then discuss the inductive biases which are present in any contrastive learning system and we analyse our framework under different views from various sub-fields of Machine Learning. Examples of how contrastive learning has been applied in computer vision, natural language processing, audio processing, and others, as well as in Reinforcement Learning are also presented. Finally, we discuss the challenges and some of the most promising future research directions ahead.

本篇论文提供了Contrastive Learning的文献综述，并提出了一个通用的Contrastive Representation Learning框架，该框架简化并统一了许多不同的对比学习方法，并对对比学习的各个组成部分进行了分类。对于任何对比学习系统存在的规约偏差进行了分析和讨论，将我们的框架根据各种机器学习子领域的不同视角进行了分析。最后，介绍了对比学习在计算机视觉、自然语言处理、音频处理以及强化学习等领域的应用，以及未来研究方向中的挑战和一些最有前途的研究方向。

对比表示学习：框架与综述