English

Inverse Problems Leveraging Pre-trained Contrastive Representations

Machine Learning 2021-10-28 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

We study a new family of inverse problems for recovering representations of corrupted data. We assume access to a pre-trained representation learning network R(x) that operates on clean images, like CLIP. The problem is to recover the representation of an image R(x), if we are only given a corrupted version A(x), for some known forward operator A. We propose a supervised inversion method that uses a contrastive objective to obtain excellent representations for highly corrupted images. Using a linear probe on our robust representations, we achieve a higher accuracy than end-to-end supervised baselines when classifying images with various types of distortions, including blurring, additive noise, and random pixel masking. We evaluate on a subset of ImageNet and observe that our method is robust to varying levels of distortion. Our method outperforms end-to-end baselines even with a fraction of the labeled data in a wide range of forward operators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.07439,
  title  = {Inverse Problems Leveraging Pre-trained Contrastive Representations},
  author = {Sriram Ravula and Georgios Smyrnis and Matt Jordan and Alexandros G. Dimakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.07439},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Initial version. Final version to appear in Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:53:25.457Z