This paper presents Prototypical Contrastive Learning (PCL), an unsupervised
representation learning method that addresses the fundamental limitations of
instance-wise contrastive learning. PCL not only learns low-level features for
the task of instance discrimination, but more importantly, it implicitly
encodes semantic structures of the data into the learned embedding space.
Specifically, we introduce prototypes as latent variables to help find the
maximum-likelihood estimation of the network parameters in an
Expectation-Maximization framework. We iteratively perform E-step as finding
the distribution of prototypes via clustering and M-step as optimizing the
network via contrastive learning. We propose ProtoNCE loss, a generalized
version of the InfoNCE loss for contrastive learning, which encourages
representations to be closer to their assigned prototypes. PCL outperforms
state-of-the-art instance-wise contrastive learning methods on multiple
benchmarks with substantial improvement in low-resource transfer learning. Code
and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/salesforce/PCL
