Representation Learning with

Contrastive Predictive Coding

Aaron van den Oord Yazhe Li Oriol Vinyals

DeepMind DeepMind DeepMind
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
arXiv:1807.03748v2 [cs.LG] 22 Jan 2019

Abstract

While supervised learning has enabled great progress in many applications, unsu-
pervised learning has not seen such widespread adoption, and remains an important
and challenging endeavor for artificial intelligence. In this work, we propose a
universal unsupervised learning approach to extract useful representations from
high-dimensional data, which we call Contrastive Predictive Coding. The key in-
sight of our model is to learn such representations by predicting the future in latent
space by using powerful autoregressive models. We use a probabilistic contrastive
loss which induces the latent space to capture information that is maximally useful
to predict future samples. It also makes the model tractable by using negative
sampling. While most prior work has focused on evaluating representations for
a particular modality, we demonstrate that our approach is able to learn useful
representations achieving strong performance on four distinct domains: speech,
images, text and reinforcement learning in 3D environments.

1 Introduction
Learning high-level representations from labeled data with layered differentiable models in an end-
to-end fashion is one of the biggest successes in artificial intelligence so far. These techniques
made manually specified features largely redundant and have greatly improved state-of-the-art in
several real-world applications [1, 2, 3]. However, many challenges remain, such as data efficiency,
robustness or generalization.
Improving representation learning requires features that are less specialized towards solving a
single supervised task. For example, when pre-training a model to do image classification, the
induced features transfer reasonably well to other image classification domains, but also lack certain
information such as color or the ability to count that are irrelevant for classification but relevant for
e.g. image captioning [4]. Similarly, features that are useful to transcribe human speech may be
less suited for speaker identification, or music genre prediction. Thus, unsupervised learning is an
important stepping stone towards robust and generic representation learning.
Despite its importance, unsupervised learning is yet to see a breakthrough similar to supervised
learning: modeling high-level representations from raw observations remains elusive. Further, it
is not always clear what the ideal representation is and if it is possible that one can learn such a
representation without additional supervision or specialization to a particular data modality.
One of the most common strategies for unsupervised learning has been to predict future, missing or
contextual information. This idea of predictive coding [5, 6] is one of the oldest techniques in signal
processing for data compression. In neuroscience, predictive coding theories suggest that the brain
predicts observations at various levels of abstraction [7, 8]. Recent work in unsupervised learning
has successfully used these ideas to learn word representations by predicting neighboring words [9].
For images, predicting color from grey-scale or the relative position of image patches has also been

Preprint. Work in progress.

ct Predictions

gar gar gar gar

zt zt+1 zt+2 zt+3 zt+4

genc genc genc genc genc genc genc genc

xt 3 xt 2 xt 1 xt xt+1 xt+2 xt+3 xt+4

Figure 1: Overview of Contrastive Predictive Coding, the proposed representation learning approach.
Although this figure shows audio as input, we use the same setup for images, text and reinforcement
learning.

shown useful [10, 11]. We hypothesize that these approaches are fruitful partly because the context
from which we predict related values are often conditionally dependent on the same shared high-level
latent information. And by casting this as a prediction problem, we automatically infer these features
of interest to representation learning.
In this paper we propose the following: first, we compress high-dimensional data into a much more
compact latent embedding space in which conditional predictions are easier to model. Secondly, we
use powerful autoregressive models in this latent space to make predictions many steps in the future.
Finally, we rely on Noise-Contrastive Estimation [12] for the loss function in similar ways that have
been used for learning word embeddings in natural language models, allowing for the whole model
to be trained end-to-end. We apply the resulting model, Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) to
widely different data modalities, images, speech, natural language and reinforcement learning, and
show that the same mechanism learns interesting high-level information on each of these domains,
outperforming other approaches.

2 Contrastive Predicting Coding

We start this section by motivating and giving intuitions behind our approach. Next, we introduce the
architecture of Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC). After that we explain the loss function that is
based on Noise-Contrastive Estimation. Lastly, we discuss related work to CPC.

2.1 Motivation and Intuitions

The main intuition behind our model is to learn the representations that encode the underlying shared
information between different parts of the (high-dimensional) signal. At the same time it discards
low-level information and noise that is more local. In time series and high-dimensional modeling,
approaches that use next step prediction exploit the local smoothness of the signal. When predicting
further in the future, the amount of shared information becomes much lower, and the model needs
to infer more global structure. These ’slow features’ [13] that span many time steps are often more
interesting (e.g., phonemes and intonation in speech, objects in images, or the story line in books.).
One of the challenges of predicting high-dimensional data is that unimodal losses such as mean-
squared error and cross-entropy are not very useful, and powerful conditional generative models which
need to reconstruct every detail in the data are usually required. But these models are computationally
intense, and waste capacity at modeling the complex relationships in the data x, often ignoring the
context c. For example, images may contain thousands of bits of information while the high-level
latent variables such as the class label contain much less information (10 bits for 1,024 categories).
This suggests that modeling p(x|c) directly may not be optimal for the purpose of extracting shared
information between x and c. When predicting future information we instead encode the target x
(future) and context c (present) into a compact distributed vector representations (via non-linear

2
learned mappings) in a way that maximally preserves the mutual information of the original signals x
and c defined as
X p(x|c)
I(x; c) = p(x, c) log . (1)
x,c
p(x)

By maximizing the mutual information between the encoded representations (which is bounded
by the MI between the input signals), we extract the underlying latent variables the inputs have in
commmon.

2.2 Contrastive Predictive Coding

Figure 1 shows the architecture of Contrastive Predictive Coding models. First, a non-linear encoder
genc maps the input sequence of observations xt to a sequence of latent representations zt = genc (xt ),
potentially with a lower temporal resolution. Next, an autoregressive model gar summarizes all z≤t in
the latent space and produces a context latent representation ct = gar (z≤t ).
As argued in the previous section we do not predict future observations xt+k directly with a generative
model pk (xt+k |ct ). Instead we model a density ratio which preserves the mutual information between
xt+k and ct (Equation 1) as follows (see next sub-section for further details):
p(xt+k |ct )
fk (xt+k , ct ) ∝ (2)
p(xt+k )
where ∝ stands for ’proportional to’ (i.e. up to a multiplicative constant). Note that the density ratio
f can be unnormalized (does not have to integrate to 1). Although any positive real score can be used
here, we use a simple log-bilinear model:

T
fk (xt+k , ct ) = exp zt+k Wk ct , (3)

In our experiments a linear transformation WkT ct is used for the prediction with a different Wk for
every step k. Alternatively, non-linear networks or recurrent neural networks could be used.
By using a density ratio f (xt+k , ct ) and inferring zt+k with an encoder, we relieve the model from
modeling the high dimensional distribution xtk . Although we cannot evaluate p(x) or p(x|c) directly,
we can use samples from these distributions, allowing us to use techniques such as Noise-Contrastive
Estimation [12, 14, 15] and Importance Sampling [16] that are based on comparing the target value
with randomly sampled negative values.
In the proposed model, either of zt and ct could be used as representation for downstream tasks.
The autoregressive model output ct can be used if extra context from the past is useful. One such
example is speech recognition, where the receptive field of zt might not contain enough information
to capture phonetic content. In other cases, where no additional context is required, zt might instead
be better. If the downstream task requires one representation for the whole sequence, as in e.g. image
classification, one can pool the representations from either zt or ct over all locations.
Finally, note that any type of encoder and autoregressive model can be used in the proposed framework.
For simplicity we opted for standard architectures such as strided convolutional layers with resnet
blocks for the encoder, and GRUs [17] for the autoregresssive model. More recent advancements
in autoregressive modeling such as masked convolutional architectures [18, 19] or self-attention
networks [20] could help improve results further.

2.3 InfoNCE Loss and Mutual Information Estimation

Both the encoder and autoregressive model are trained to jointly optimize a loss based on NCE, which
we will call InfoNCE. Given a set X = {x1 , . . . xN } of N random samples containing one positive
sample from p(xt+k |ct ) and N − 1 negative samples from the ’proposal’ distribution p(xt+k ), we
optimize:
" #
fk (xt+k , ct )
LN = − E log P (4)
X xj ∈X fk (xj , ct )

3
Optimizing this loss will result in fk (xt+k , ct ) estimating the density ratio in equation 2. This can be
shown as follows.
The loss in Equation 4 is the categorical cross-entropy of classifying the positive sample correctly,
with Pfk fk being the prediction of the model. Let us write the optimal probability for this loss
X
as p(d = i|X, ct ) with [d = i] being the indicator that sample xi is the ’positive’ sample. The
probability that sample xi was drawn from the conditional distribution p(xt+k |ct ) rather than the
proposal distribution p(xt+k ) can be derived as follows:
Q
p(xi |ct ) l6=i p(xl )
p(d = i|X, ct ) = PN Q
j=1 p(xj |ct ) l6=j p(xl )
p(xi |ct )
p(xi )
= PN p(xj |ct )
. (5)
j=1 p(xj )

p(xt+k |ct )
As we can see, the optimal value for f (xt+k , ct ) in Equation 4 is proportional to p(xt+k ) and this
is independent of the the choice of the number of negative samples N − 1.
Though not required for training, we can evaluate the mutual information between the variables ct
and xt+k as follows:
I(xt+k , ct ) ≥ log(N ) − LN ,
which becomes tighter as N becomes larger. Also observe that minimizing the InfoNCE loss LN
maximizes a lower bound on mutual information. For more details see Appendix.

2.4 Related Work

CPC is a new method that combines predicting future observations (predictive coding) with a
probabilistic contrastive loss (Equation 4). This allows us to extract slow features, which maximize
the mutual information of observations over long time horizons. Contrastive losses and predictive
coding have individually been used in different ways before, which we will now discuss.
Contrastive loss functions have been used by many authors in the past. For example, the techniques
proposed by [21, 22, 23] were based on triplet losses using a max-margin approach to separate positive
from negative examples. More recent work includes Time Contrastive Networks [24] which proposes
to minimize distances between embeddings from multiple viewpoints of the same scene and whilst
maximizing distances between embeddings extracted from different timesteps. In Time Contrastive
Learning [25] a contrastive loss is used to predict the segment-ID of multivariate time-series as a way
to extract features and perform nonlinear ICA.
There has also been work and progress on defining prediction tasks from related observations as a
way to extract useful representations, and many of these have been applied to language. In Word2Vec
[9] neighbouring words are predicted using a contrastive loss. Skip-thought vectors [26] and Byte
mLSTM [27] are alternatives which go beyond word prediction with a Recurrent Neural Network,
and use maximum likelihood over sequences of observations. In Computer Vision [28] use a triplet
loss on tracked video patches so that patches from the same object at different timesteps are more
similar to each other than to random patches. [11, 29] propose to predict the relative postion of
patches in an image and in [10] color values are predicted from a greyscale images.

3 Experiments
We present benchmarks on four different application domains: speech, images, natural language and
reinforcement learning. For every domain we train CPC models and probe what the representations
contain with either a linear classification task or qualitative evaluations, and in reinforcement learning
we measure how the auxiliary CPC loss speeds up learning of the agent.

3.1 Audio

For audio, we use a 100-hour subset of the publicly available LibriSpeech dataset [30]. Although the
dataset does not provide labels other than the raw text, we obtained force-aligned phone sequences

4
Figure 2: t-SNE visualization of audio (speech) Figure 3: Average accuracy of predicting the
representations for a subset of 10 speakers (out positive sample in the contrastive loss for 1 to 20
of 251). Every color represents a different latent steps in the future of a speech waveform.
speaker. The model predicts up to 200ms in the future as
every step consists of 10ms of audio.

Method ACC
Method ACC
Phone classification
Random initialization 27.6 #steps predicted
MFCC features 39.7 2 steps 28.5
CPC 64.6 4 steps 57.6
Supervised 74.6 8 steps 63.6
12 steps 64.6
Speaker classification 16 steps 63.8
Random initialization 1.87 Negative samples from
MFCC features 17.6 Mixed speaker 64.6
CPC 97.4 Same speaker 65.5
Supervised 98.5 Mixed speaker (excl.) 57.3
Same speaker (excl.) 64.6
Table 1: LibriSpeech phone and speaker
Current sequence only 65.2
classification results. For phone classifi-
cation there are 41 possible classes and Table 2: LibriSpeech phone classifica-
for speaker classification 251. All mod- tion ablation experiments. More details
els used the same architecture and the can be found in Section 3.1.
same audio input sizes.

with the Kaldi toolkit [31] and pre-trained models on Librispeech1 . We have made the aligned phone
labels and our train/test split available for download on Google Drive2 . The dataset contains speech
from 251 different speakers.
The encoder architecture genc used in our experiments consists of a strided convolutional neural
network that runs directly on the 16KHz PCM audio waveform. We use five convolutional layers
with strides [5, 4, 2, 2, 2], filter-sizes [10, 8, 4, 4, 4] and 512 hidden units with ReLU activations. The
total downsampling factor of the network is 160 so that there is a feature vector for every 10ms of
speech, which is also the rate of the phoneme sequence labels obtained with Kaldi. We then use a
GRU RNN [17] for the autoregressive part of the model, gar with 256 dimensional hidden state. The
output of the GRU at every timestep is used as the context c from which we predict 12 timesteps in
the future using the contrastive loss. We train on sampled audio windows of length 20480. We use
the Adam optimizer [32] with a learning rate of 2e-4, and use 8 GPUs each with a minibatch of 8
examples from which the negative samples in the contrastive loss are drawn. The model is trained
until convergence, which happens roughly at 300,000 updates.
Figure 3 shows the accuracy of the model to predict latents in the future, from 1 to 20 timesteps. We
report the average number of times the logit for the positive sample is higher than for the negative
samples in the probabilistic contrastive loss. This figure also shows that the objective is neither trivial
nor impossible, and as expected the prediction task becomes harder as the target is further away.
1
www.kaldi-asr.org/downloads/build/6/trunk/egs/librispeech/
2
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BhJ2umKH3whguxMwifaKtSra0TgAbtfb

5
gar - output

genc - output

ct
64 px
zt+2
zt+3 Predictions
zt+4
50% overlap
256 px
input image

Figure 4: Visualization of Contrastive Predictive Coding for images (2D adaptation of Figure 1).

To understand the representations extracted by CPC, we measure the phone prediction performance
with a linear classifier trained on top of these features, which shows how linearly separable the
relevant classes are under these features. We extract the outputs of the GRU (256 dimensional), i.e.
ct , for the whole dataset after model convergence and train a multi-class linear logistic regression
classifier. The results are shown in Table 1 (top). We compare the accuracy with three baselines:
representations from a random initialized model (i.e., genc and gar are untrained), MFCC features,
and a model that is trained end-to-end supervised with the labeled data. These two models have the
same architecture as the one used to extract the CPC representations. The fully supervised model
serves as an indication for what is achievable with this architecture. We also found that not all the
information encoded is linearly accessible. When we used a single hidden layer instead the accuracy
increases from 64.6 to 72.5, which is closer to the accuracy of the fully supervised model.
Table 2 gives an overview of two ablation studies of CPC for phone classification. In the first set
we vary the number of steps the model predicts showing that predicting multiple steps is important
for learning useful features. In the second set we compare different strategies for drawing negative
sample, all predicting 12 steps (which gave the best result in the first ablation). In the mixed speaker
experiment the negative samples contain examples of different speakers (first row), in contrast to
same speaker experiment (second row). In the third and fourth experiment we exclude the current
sequence to draw negative samples from (so only other examples in the minibatch are present in X)
and in the last experiment we only draw negative samples within the sequence (thus all samples are
from the same speaker).
Beyond phone classification, Table 1 (bottom) shows the accuracy of performing speaker identity
(out of 251) with a linear classifier from the same representation (we do not average utterances over
time). Interestingly, CPCs capture both speaker identity and speech contents, as demonstrated by
the good accuracies attained with a simple linear classifier, which also gets close to the oracle, fully
supervised networks.
Additionally, Figure 2 shows a t-SNE visualization [33] of how discriminative the embeddings are
for speaker voice-characteristics. It is important to note that the window size (maximum context size
for the GRU) has a big impact on the performance, and longer segments would give better results.
Our model had a maximum of 20480 timesteps to process, which is slightly longer than a second.

3.2 Vision

In our visual representation experiments we use the ILSVRC ImageNet competition dataset [34].
The ImageNet dataset has been used to evaluate unsupervised vision models by many authors
[28, 11, 35, 10, 29, 36]. We follow the same setup as [36] and use a ResNet v2 101 architecture [37]
as the image encoder genc to extract CPC representations (note that this encoder is not pretrained).
We did not use Batch-Norm [38]. After unsupervised training, a linear layer is trained to measure
classification accuracy on ImageNet labels.

6
Figure 5: Every row shows image patches that activate a certain neuron in the CPC architecture.

The training procedure is as follows: from a 256x256 image we extract a 7x7 grid of 64x64 crops
with 32 pixels overlap. Simple data augmentation proved helpful on both the 256x256 images and the
64x64 crops. The 256x256 images are randomly cropped from a 300x300 image, horizontally flipped
with a probability of 50% and converted to greyscale. For each of the 64x64 crops we randomly take
a 60x60 subcrop and pad them back to a 64x64 image.
Each crop is then encoded by the ResNet-v2-101 encoder. We use the outputs from the third residual
block, and spatially mean-pool to get a single 1024-d vector per 64x64 patch. This results in a
7x7x1024 tensor. Next, we use a PixelCNN-style autoregressive model [19] (a convolutional row-
GRU PixelRNN [39] gave similar results) to make predictions about the latent activations in following
rows top-to-bottom, visualized in Figure 4. We predict up to five rows from the 7x7 grid, and we
apply the contrastive loss for each patch in the row. We used Adam optimizer with a learning rate of
2e-4 and trained on 32 GPUs each with a batch size of 16.
For the linear classifier trained on top of the CPC features we use SGD with a momentum of 0.9, a
learning rate schedule of 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001 for 50k, 25k and 10k updates and batch size of 2048 on
a single GPU. Note that when training the linear classifier we first spatially mean-pool the 7x7x1024
representation to a single 1024 dimensional vector. This is slightly different from [36] which uses
a 3x3x1024 representation without pooling, and thus has more parameters in the supervised linear
mapping (which could be advantageous).
Tables 3 and 4 show the top-1 and top-5 classification accuracies compared with the state-of-the-art.
Despite being relatively domain agnostic, CPCs improve upon state-of-the-art by 9% absolute in
top-1 accuracy, and 4% absolute in top-5 accuracy.

3.3 Natural Language

Our natural language experiments follow closely the procedure from [26] which was used for the
skip-thought vectors model. We first learn our unsupervised model on the BookCorpus dataset [42],
and evaluate the capability of our model as a generic feature extractor by using CPC representations
for a set of classification tasks. To cope with words that are not seen during training, we employ
vocabulary expansion the same way as [26], where a linear mapping is constructed between word2vec
and the word embeddings learned by the model.
For the classification tasks we used the following datasets: movie review sentiment (MR) [43],
customer product reviews (CR) [44], subjectivity/objectivity [45], opinion polarity (MPQA) [46]
and question-type classification (TREC) [47]. As in [26] we train a logistic regression classifier and

7
Method Top-1 ACC
Using AlexNet conv5
Video [28] 29.8
Relative Position [11] 30.4
BiGan [35] 34.8
Colorization [10] 35.2 Method Top-5 ACC
Jigsaw [29] * 38.1 Motion Segmentation (MS) 48.3
Using ResNet-V2 Exemplar (Ex) 53.1
Motion Segmentation [36] 27.6 Relative Position (RP) 59.2
Exemplar [36] 31.5 Colorization (Col) 62.5
Relative Position [36] 36.2 Combination of
Colorization [36] 39.6 MS + Ex + RP + Col 69.3
CPC 48.7 CPC 73.6

Table 3: ImageNet top-1 unsupervised classifi- Table 4: ImageNet top-5 unsupervised classi-
cation results. *Jigsaw is not directly compa- fication results. Previous results with MS, Ex,
rable to the other AlexNet results because of RP and Col were taken from [36] and are the
architectural differences. best reported results on this task.

Method MR CR Subj MPQA TREC

Paragraph-vector [40] 74.8 78.1 90.5 74.2 91.8
Skip-thought vector [26] 75.5 79.3 92.1 86.9 91.4
Skip-thought + LN [41] 79.5 82.6 93.4 89.0 -
CPC 76.9 80.1 91.2 87.7 96.8

Table 5: Classification accuracy on five common NLP benchmarks. We follow the same transfer
learning setup from Skip-thought vectors [26] and use the BookCorpus dataset as source. [40] is an
unsupervised approach to learning sentence-level representations. [26] is an alternative unsupervised
learning approach. [41] is the same skip-thought model with layer normalization trained for 1M
iterations.

evaluate with 10-fold cross-validation for MR, CR, Subj, MPQA and use the train/test split for TREC.
A L2 regularization weight was chosen via cross-validation (therefore nested cross-validation for the
first 4 datasets).
Our model consists of a simple sentence encoder genc (a 1D-convolution + ReLU + mean-pooling)
that embeds a whole sentence into a 2400-dimension vector z, followed by a GRU (2400 hidden
units) which predicts up to 3 future sentence embeddings with the contrastive loss to form c. We used
Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 2e-4 trained on 8 GPUs, each with a batch size of 64. We
found that more advanced sentence encoders did not significantly improve the results, which may be
due to the simplicity of the transfer tasks (e.g., in MPQA most datapoints consists of one or a few
words), and the fact that bag-of-words models usually perform well on many NLP tasks [48].
Results on evaluation tasks are shown in Table 5 where we compare our model against other models
that have been used using the same datasets. The performance of our method is very similar to the
skip-thought vector model, with the advantage that it does not require a powerful LSTM as word-level
decoder, therefore much faster to train. Although this is a standard transfer learning benchmark, we
found that models that learn better relationships in the childeren books did not necessarily perform
better on the target tasks (which are very different: movie reviews etc). We note that better [49, 27]
results have been published on these target datasets, by transfer learning from a different source task.

8
Figure 6: Reinforcement Learning results for 5 DeepMind Lab tasks used in [50]. Black: batched
A2C baseline, Red: with auxiliary contrastive loss.

3.4 Reinforcement Learning

Finally, we evaluate the proposed unsupervised learning approach on five reinforcement learn-
ing in 3D environments of DeepMind Lab [51]: rooms_watermaze, explore_goal_locations_small,
seekavoid_arena_01, lasertag_three_opponents_small and rooms_keys_doors_puzzle.
This setup differs from the previous three. Here, we take the standard batched A2C [52] agent as
base model and add CPC as an auxiliary loss. We do not use a replay buffer, so the predictions have
to adapt to the changing behavior of the policy. The learned representation encodes a distribution
over its future observations.
Following the same approach as [50], we perform a random search over the entropy regularization
weight, the learning-rate and epsilon hyperparameters for RMSProp [53]. The unroll length for the
A2C is 100 steps and we predict up to 30 steps in the future to derive the contrastive loss. The baseline
agent consists of a convolutional encoder which maps every input frame into a single vector followed
by a temporal LSTM. We use the same encoder as in the baseline agent and only add the linear
prediction mappings for the contrastive loss, resulting in minimal overhead which also showcases the
simplicity of implementing our method on top of an existing architecture that has been designed and
tuned for a particular task. We refer to [50] for all other hyperparameter and implementation details.
Figure 6 shows that for 4 out of the 5 games performance of the agent improves significantly with the
contrastive loss after training on 1 billion frames. For lasertag_three_opponents_small, contrastive
loss does not help nor hurt. We suspect that this is due to the task design, which does not require
memory and thus yields a purely reactive policy.

4 Conclusion
In this paper we presented Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC), a framework for extracting compact
latent representations to encode predictions over future observations. CPC combines autoregressive
modeling and noise-contrastive estimation with intuitions from predictive coding to learn abstract
representations in an unsupervised fashion. We tested these representations in a wide variety of
domains: audio, images, natural language and reinforcement learning and achieve strong or state-
of-the-art performance when used as stand-alone features. The simplicity and low computational
requirements to train the model, together with the encouraging results in challenging reinforcement
learning domains when used in conjunction with the main loss are exciting developments towards
useful unsupervised learning that applies universally to many more data modalities.

5 Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Andriy Mnih, Andrew Zisserman, Alex Graves and Carl Doersch for their
helpful comments on the paper and Lasse Espeholt for making the A2C baseline available.

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A Appendix
A.1 Estimating the Mutual Information with InfoNCE

By optimizing InfoNCE, the CPC loss we defined in Equation 4, we are maximizing the mutual
information between ct and zt+k (which is bounded by the MI between ct and xt+k ). This can be
shown as follows.
t+k |ct )
As already shown in Section 2.3, the optimal value for f (xt+k , ct ) is given by p(x
p(xt+k ) . Inserting
this back in to Equation 4 and splitting X into the positive example and the negative examples Xneg
results in:
 
p(xt+k |ct )
p(xt+k )
Lopt
N = − E log

p(xj |ct )
 (6)
X p(x t+k |ct )
P
p(xt+k ) + xj ∈Xneg p(xj )
 
p(xt+k ) X p(xj |ct ) 
= E log 1 + (7)
X p(xt+k |ct ) p(xj )
xj ∈Xneg

p(xt+k ) p(xj |ct )
≈ E log 1 + (N − 1) E (8)
X p(xt+k |ct ) xj p(xj )

p(xt+k )
= E log 1 + (N − 1) (9)
X p(xt+k |ct )

p(xt+k )
≥ E log N (10)
X p(xt+k |ct )
= −I(xt+k , ct ) + log(N ), (11)

Therefore, I(xt+k , ct ) ≥ log(N ) − LoptN . This trivially also holds for other f that obtain a worse
(higher) LN . Equation 8 quickly becomes more accurate as N increases. At the same time log(N ) −
LN also increases, so it’s useful to use large values of N .
InfoNCE is also related to MINE [54]. Without loss of generality let’s write f (x, c) = eF (x,c) , then
" #
f (x, c) h i h X i
E log P = E F (x, c) − E log eF (xj ,c) (12)
X xj ∈X f (xj , c) (x,c) (x,c)
xj ∈X
h i h X i
= E F (x, c) − E log eF (x,c) + eF (xj ,c) (13)
(x,c) (x,c)
xj ∈Xneg
h i h X i
≤ E F (x, c) − E log eF (xj ,c) (14)
(x,c) c
xj ∈Xneg
h i h 1 X i
= E F (x, c) − E log eF (xj ,c) + log(N − 1)
(x,c) c N −1
xj ∈Xneg
(15)
is equivalent to the MINE estimator (up to a constant). So we maximize a lower bound on this
estimator. We found that using MINE directly gave identical performance when the task was non-
trivial, but became very unstable if the target was easy to predict from the context (e.g., when
predicting a single step in the future and the target overlaps with the context).

13