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How do humans learn to acquire a powerful, flexible and robust representation of objects? While much of this process remains unknown, it is clear that humans do not require millions of object labels. Excitingly, recent algorithmic advancements in self-supervised learning now enable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn useful visual object representations without supervised labels, too. In the light of this recent breakthrough, we here compare self-supervised networks to supervised models and human behaviour. We tested models on 15 generalisation datasets for which large-scale human behavioural data is available (130K highly controlled psychophysical trials). Surprisingly, current self-supervised CNNs share four key characteristics of their supervised counterparts: (1.) relatively poor noise robustness (with the notable exception of SimCLR), (2.) non-human category-level error patterns, (3.) non-human image-level error patterns (yet high similarity to supervised model errors) and (4.) a bias towards texture. Taken together, these results suggest that the strategies learned through todays supervised and self-supervised training objectives end up being surprisingly similar, but distant from human-like behaviour. That being said, we are clearly just at the beginning of what could be called a self-supervised revolution of machine vision, and we are hopeful that future self-supervised models behave differently from supervised ones, and---perhaps---more similar to robust human object recognition.
While self-supervised representation learning (SSL) has received widespread attention from the community, recent research argue that its performance will suffer a cliff fall when the model size decreases. The current method mainly relies on contrastive learning to train the network and in this work, we propose a simple yet effective Distilled Contrastive Learning (DisCo) to ease the issue by a large margin. Specifically, we find the final embedding obtained by the mainstream SSL methods contains the most fruitful information, and propose to distill the final embedding to maximally transmit a teachers knowledge to a lightweight model by constraining the last embedding of the student to be consistent with that of the teacher. In addition, in the experiment, we find that there exists a phenomenon termed Distilling BottleNeck and present to enlarge the embedding dimension to alleviate this problem. Our method does not introduce any extra parameter to lightweight models during deployment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art on all lightweight models. Particularly, when ResNet-101/ResNet-50 is used as teacher to teach EfficientNet-B0, the linear result of EfficientNet-B0 on ImageNet is very close to ResNet-101/ResNet-50, but the number of parameters of EfficientNet-B0 is only 9.4%/16.3% of ResNet-101/ResNet-50. Code is available at https://github. com/Yuting-Gao/DisCo-pytorch.
Previous studies dominantly target at self-supervised learning on real-valued networks and have achieved many promising results. However, on the more challenging binary neural networks (BNNs), this task has not yet been fully explored in the community. In this paper, we focus on this more difficult scenario: learning networks where both weights and activations are binary, meanwhile, without any human annotated labels. We observe that the commonly used contrastive objective is not satisfying on BNNs for competitive accuracy, since the backbone network contains relatively limited capacity and representation ability. Hence instead of directly applying existing self-supervised methods, which cause a severe decline in performance, we present a novel guided learning paradigm from real-valued to distill binary networks on the final prediction distribution, to minimize the loss and obtain desirable accuracy. Our proposed method can boost the simple contrastive learning baseline by an absolute gain of 5.5~15% on BNNs. We further reveal that it is difficult for BNNs to recover the similar predictive distributions as real-valued models when training without labels. Thus, how to calibrate them is key to address the degradation in performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on the large-scale ImageNet and downstream datasets. Our method achieves substantial improvement over the simple contrastive learning baseline, and is even comparable to many mainstream supervised BNN methods. Code is available at https://github.com/szq0214/S2-BNN.
Self-supervised learning (especially contrastive learning) has attracted great interest due to its tremendous potentials in learning discriminative representations in an unsupervised manner. Despite the acknowledged successes, existing contrastive learning methods suffer from very low learning efficiency, e.g., taking about ten times more training epochs than supervised learning for comparable recognition accuracy. In this paper, we discover two contradictory phenomena in contrastive learning that we call under-clustering and over-clustering problems, which are major obstacles to learning efficiency. Under-clustering means that the model cannot efficiently learn to discover the dissimilarity between inter-class samples when the negative sample pairs for contrastive learning are insufficient to differentiate all the actual object categories. Over-clustering implies that the model cannot efficiently learn the feature representation from excessive negative sample pairs, which enforces the model to over-cluster samples of the same actual categories into different clusters. To simultaneously overcome these two problems, we propose a novel self-supervised learning framework using a median triplet loss. Precisely, we employ a triplet loss tending to maximize the relative distance between the positive pair and negative pairs to address the under-clustering problem; and we construct the negative pair by selecting the negative sample of a median similarity score from all negative samples to avoid the over-clustering problem, guaranteed by the Bernoulli Distribution model. We extensively evaluate our proposed framework in several large-scale benchmarks (e.g., ImageNet, SYSU-30k, and COCO). The results demonstrate the superior performance (e.g., the learning efficiency) of our model over the latest state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin. Codes available at: https://github.com/wanggrun/triplet.
This paper investigates two techniques for developing efficient self-supervised vision transformers (EsViT) for visual representation learning. First, we show through a comprehensive empirical study that multi-stage architectures with sparse self-attentions can significantly reduce modeling complexity but with a cost of losing the ability to capture fine-grained correspondences between image regions. Second, we propose a new pre-training task of region matching which allows the model to capture fine-grained region dependencies and as a result significantly improves the quality of the learned vision representations. Our results show that combining the two techniques, EsViT achieves 81.3% top-1 on the ImageNet linear probe evaluation, outperforming prior arts with around an order magnitude of higher throughput. When transferring to downstream linear classification tasks, EsViT outperforms its supervised counterpart on 17 out of 18 datasets. The code and models will be publicly available.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) is rapidly closing the gap with supervised methods on large computer vision benchmarks. A successful approach to SSL is to learn embeddings which are invariant to distortions of the input sample. However, a recurring issue with this approach is the existence of trivial constant solutions. Most current methods avoid such solutions by careful implementation details. We propose an objective function that naturally avoids collapse by measuring the cross-correlation matrix between the outputs of two identical networks fed with distort