SimCDL: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Dictionary Learning

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the dictionary learning (DL) initialization problem, leveraging the SimCLR framework from deep learning in a self-supervised manner. Dictionary learning seeks to represent signals as sparse combinations of dictionary atoms, but effective initialization remains challenging. By applying contrastive learning, we encourage similar representations for augmented versions of the same sample while distinguishing between different samples. This results in a more diverse and incoherent set of atoms, which enhances the performance of DL applications in classification and anomaly detection tasks. Our experiments across several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for improving dictionary learning initialization and its subsequent impact on performance in various applications.