Counterfactual contrastive learning: robust representations via causal
  image synthesis
Melanie Roschewitz Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro Tian Xia Galvin Khara Ben Glocker
Contrastive pretraining is well-known to improve downstream task performance
and model generalisation, especially in limited label settings. However, it is
sensitive to the choice of augmentation pipeline. Positive pairs should
preserve semantic information while destroying domain-specific information.
Standard augmentation pipelines emulate domain-specific changes with
pre-defined photometric transformations, but what if we could simulate
realistic domain changes instead? In this work, we show how to utilise recent
progress in counterfactual image generation to this effect. We propose
CF-SimCLR, a counterfactual contrastive learning approach which leverages
approximate counterfactual inference for positive pair creation. Comprehensive
evaluation across five datasets, on chest radiography and mammography,
demonstrates that CF-SimCLR substantially improves robustness to acquisition
shift with higher downstream performance on both in- and out-of-distribution
data, particularly for domains which are under-represented during training.