CARP learns prototypes in an end-to-end online fashion using gradient descent without additional non-differentiable modules to solve the cluster assignment problem. CARP optimizes a new pretext task based on random partitions of prototypes that regularizes the model and enforces consistency between views' assignments. Additionally, our method improves training stability and prevents collapsed solutions in joint-embedding training. Through an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that CARP's representations are suitable for learning downstream tasks. We evaluate CARP's representations capabilities in 17 datasets across many standard protocols, including linear evaluation, few-shot classification, $k$-NN, $k$-means, image retrieval, and copy detection. We compare CARP performance to 11 existing self-supervised methods. We extensively ablate our method and demonstrate that our proposed random partition pretext task improves the quality of the learned representations by devising multiple random classification tasks.In transfer learning tasks, CARP achieves the best performance on average against many SSL methods trained for a longer time.

CARP learns prototypes in an end-to-end online fashion using gradient descent without additional non-differentiable modules to solve the cluster assignment problem. CARP optimizes a new pretext task based on random partitions of prototypes that regularizes the model and enforces consistency between views' assignments. Additionally, our method improves training stability and prevents collapsed solutions in joint-embedding training. Through an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that CARP's representations are suitable for learning downstream tasks. We evaluate CARP's representations capabilities in 17 datasets across many standard protocols, including linear evaluation, few-shot classification, k -NN, k -means, image retrieval, and copy detection.

We introduce Consistent Assignment for Representation Learning (CARL), an unsupervised learning method to learn visual representations by combining ideas from self-supervised contrastive learning and deep clustering. By viewing contrastive learning from a clustering perspective, CARL learns unsupervised representations by learning a set of general prototypes that serve as energy anchors to enforce different views of a given image to be assigned to the same prototype. Unlike contemporary work on contrastive learning with deep clustering, CARL proposes to learn the set of general prototypes in an online fashion, using gradient descent without the necessity of using non-differentiable algorithms or K-Means to solve the cluster assignment problem. CARL surpasses its competitors in many representations learning benchmarks, including linear evaluation, semi-supervised learning, and transfer learning.

We investigate rules which allow variable elimination in binary CSP (constraint satisfaction problem) instances while conserving satisfiability. We study variable-elimination rules based on the language of forbidden patterns enriched with counting and quantification over variables and values. We propose new rules and compare them, both theoretically and experimentally. We give optimised algorithms to apply these rules and show that each defines a novel tractable class. Using our variable-elimination rules in preprocessing allowed us to solve more benchmark problems than without.

Tractable classes constitute an important issue in Artificial Intelligence to define new islands of tractability for reasoning or problem solving. In the area of constraint networks, numerous tractable classes have been defined, and recently, the Broken Triangle Property (BTP) has been shown as one of the most important of them, this class including several classes previously defined. In this paper, we propose a new class called ETP for Extendable-Triple Property, which generalizes BTP, by including it. Combined with the verification of the Strong-Path-Consistency, ETP is shown to be a new tractable class. Moreover, this class inherits some desirable properties of BTP including the fact that the instances of this class can be solved thanks to usual algorithms (such as MAC or RFL) used in most solvers. We give the theoretical material about this new class and we present an experimental study which shows that from a practical viewpoint, it seems more usable in practice than BTP.