  Although the self-supervised pre-training of transformer models has resulted
in the revolutionizing of natural language processing (NLP) applications and
the achievement of state-of-the-art results with regard to various benchmarks,
this process is still vulnerable to small and imperceptible permutations
originating from legitimate inputs. Intuitively, the representations should be
similar in the feature space with subtle input permutations, while large
variations occur with different meanings. This motivates us to investigate the
learning of robust textual representation in a contrastive manner. However, it
is non-trivial to obtain opposing semantic instances for textual samples. In
this study, we propose a disentangled contrastive learning method that
separately optimizes the uniformity and alignment of representations without
negative sampling. Specifically, we introduce the concept of momentum
representation consistency to align features and leverage power normalization
while conforming the uniformity. Our experimental results for the NLP
benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can obtain better results compared
with the baselines, as well as achieve promising improvements with invariance
tests and adversarial attacks. The code is available in
https://github.com/zxlzr/DCL.
