Attention-Driven Dropout: A Simple Method to Improve Self-supervised Contrastive Sentence Embeddings

Self-contrastive learning has proven effective for vision and natural language tasks. It aims to learn aligned data representations by encoding similar and dissimilar sentence pairs without human annotation. Therefore, data augmentation plays a crucial role in the learned embedding quality. However, in natural language processing (NLP), creating augmented samples for unsupervised contrastive learning is challenging since random editing may modify the semantic meanings of sentences and thus affect learning good representations. In this paper, we introduce a simple, still effective approach dubbed ADD (Attention-DrivenDropout) to generate better-augmented views of sentences to be used in self-contrastive learning. Given a sentence and a Pre-trained Transformer Language Model (PLM), such as RoBERTa, we use the aggregated attention scores of the PLM to remove the less “informative” tokens from the input. We consider two alternative algorithms based on NaiveAggregation across layers/heads and AttentionRollout [1]. Our approach significantly improves the overall performance of various self-supervised contrastive-based methods, including SimCSE [14], DiffCSE [10], and InfoCSE [33] by facilitating the generation of high-quality positive pairs required by these methods. Through empirical evaluations on multiple Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) and Transfer Learning tasks, we observe enhanced performance across the board.