arXiv:2604.08573cs.LGcs.AI2026-04

用轮廓系数思想设计新损失,让特征更紧凑分离且计算轻量

Silhouette Loss: Differentiable Global Structure Learning for Deep Representations

论文配图:Silhouette Loss: Differentiable Global Structure Learning for Deep Representations
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于轮廓系数设计可微全局结构损失,批量评估样本与各类关系
  • 结合交叉熵后在7个数据集上提升平均准确率至39.08%,优于对比方法
  • 轻量高效,可无缝融合现有模型,适合追求性能与效率平衡的研究者

学习具有区分性的表示是监督深度学习的核心目标。尽管交叉熵(CE)仍是分类任务的主流目标函数,但它未显式约束嵌入空间中的理想几何特性,如类内紧凑性和类间分离性。现有的度量学习方法(包括有监督对比学习SupCon和基于代理的方法)通过处理成对或代理关系来弥补这一缺陷,但通常带来更高的计算开销和复杂度。本文提出软轮廓损失(Soft Silhouette Loss),一种受聚类分析中经典轮廓系数启发的新型可微目标函数。与成对目标不同,该公式在批量层面评估每个样本与所有类别之间的关系,提供全局结构的度量。所提损失直接促使样本更接近自身类别而非其他类别,同时保持轻量化。软轮廓损失可与交叉熵无缝结合,且与有监督对比学习互补。我们提出一种混合目标,联合优化局部成对一致性与全局聚类结构。在七个不同数据集上的大量实验表明:(i) 在交叉熵基础上增加软轮廓损失能持续优于交叉熵及其他度量学习基线;(ii) 混合方案优于单独使用SupCon;(iii) 组合方法取得最佳性能,平均顶1准确率从36.71%(仅用交叉熵)和37.85%(SupCon2)提升至39.08%,且计算开销显著更低。结果表明,经典聚类原则可重新诠释为深度学习的可微目标,从而高效优化表示空间中的局部与全局结构。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Learning discriminative representations is a central goal of supervised deep learning. While cross-entropy (CE) remains the dominant objective for classification, it does not explicitly enforce desirable geometric properties in the embedding space, such as intra-class compactness and inter-class separation. Existing metric learning approaches, including supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) and proxy-based methods, address this limitation by operating on pairwise or proxy-based relationships, but often increase computational cost and complexity. In this work, we introduce Soft Silhouette Loss, a novel differentiable objective inspired by the classical silhouette coefficient from clustering analysis. Unlike pairwise objectives, our formulation evaluates each sample against all classes in the batch, providing a batch-level notion of global structure. The proposed loss directly encourages samples to be closer to their own class than to competing classes, while remaining lightweight. Soft Silhouette Loss can be seamlessly combined with cross-entropy, and is also complementary to supervised contrastive learning. We propose a hybrid objective that integrates them, jointly optimizing local pairwise consistency and global cluster structure. Extensive experiments on seven diverse datasets demonstrate that: (i) augmenting CE with Soft Silhouette Loss consistently improves over CE and other metric learning baselines; (ii) the hybrid formulation outperforms SupCon alone; and (iii) the combined method achieves the best performance, improving average top-1 accuracy from 36.71% (CE) and 37.85% (SupCon2) to 39.08%, while incurring substantially lower computational overhead. These results suggest that classical clustering principles can be reinterpreted as differentiable objectives for deep learning, enabling efficient optimization of both local and global structure in representation spaces.

表示学习损失函数聚类深度学习

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