New `hard_mining_k` parameter on InfoNCELoss. When >0 and queue is non-empty,
each query row keeps only its K highest-similarity queue entries (via
`torch.topk`) as negatives, instead of the full queue. Fully vectorized —
no Python loop, no extra forward pass.
Rationale: the memory bank grows to 4096 detached gallery embeddings, but
most are easy negatives that contribute almost nothing to the gradient.
Hard mining focuses compute on the small subset that actually shapes the
decision boundary. +2-3% R@1 in similar contrastive setups.
Edge cases:
- K=0: mining disabled, full queue used (original behavior).
- K >= queue size: falls back to full queue (e.g. warmup when queue is small).
- Queue empty: in-batch only, no changes.
Default in `gtauav_balanced.gin`: K=512 (1/8 of queue). Smoke-train updated
to exercise the full memory-bank + mining path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
c30726998b