On Isotropy and Learning Dynamics of Contrastive-based Sentence Representation Learning

Incorporating contrastive learning objectives in sentence representation learning (SRL) has yielded significant improvements on many sentence-level NLP tasks. However, It is not well understood why contrastive learning works for learning sentence-level semantics. In this paper, we take a closer look at contrastive sentence representation learning through the lens of isotropy and learning dynamics. We interpret its success stories through the geometry of the representation shifts. We show that contrastive learning brings isotropy, and surprisingly learns to converge tokens to similar positions in the semantic space if given the signal that they are in the same sentence. Also, what we formalize as "spurious contextualization" is mitigated for semantically meaningful tokens, while augmented for functional ones. The embedding space is pushed toward the origin during training, with more areas now better defined. We ablate these findings by observing the learning dynamic with different training temperatures, batch sizes and pooling methods. With these findings, we aim to shed light on future designs of sentence representation learning methods.