Google Brain's SimCLRv2 Achieves New SOTA in Semi-Supervised Learning

Following on the February release of its contrastive learning framework SimCLR, the same team of Google Brain researchers guided by Turing Award honouree Dr. Geoffrey Hinton has presented SimCLRv2, an upgraded approach that boosts the SOTA results by 21.6 percent. The updated framework takes the "unsupervised pretrain, supervised fine-tune" paradigm popular in natural language processing and applies it to image recognition. Unlabelled data is learned in a task-agnostic way in the pretraining phase, which means the model has no prior classification knowledge. The researchers find that using a deep and wide neural network can be more label-efficient and greatly improve accuracy. Unlike SimCLR, whose largest model is ResNet-50, SimCLRv2's largest model is a 152-layer ResNet, which is three times wider in channels and selective kernels.