{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/mixing-natural-and-synthetic-images-for","title":"MixDiff: Mixing Natural and Synthetic Images for Robust Self-Supervised Representations","arxiv_id":"2406.12368","date":"2024-06-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Reza Akbarian Bafghi","Nidhin Harilal","Claire Monteleoni","Maziar Raissi"],"abstract":"This paper introduces MixDiff, a new self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training framework that combines real and synthetic images. Unlike traditional SSL methods that predominantly use real images, MixDiff uses a variant of Stable Diffusion to replace an augmented instance of a real image, facilitating the learning of cross real-synthetic image representations. Our key insight is that while models trained solely on synthetic images underperform, combining real and synthetic data leads to more robust and adaptable representations. Experiments show MixDiff enhances SimCLR, BarlowTwins, and DINO across various robustness datasets and domain transfer tasks, boosting SimCLR's ImageNet-1K accuracy by 4.56%. Our framework also demonstrates comparable performance without needing any augmentations, a surprising finding in SSL where augmentations are typically crucial.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12368v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12368v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"mixing-natural-and-synthetic-images-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/cryptonymous9/mixing-ssl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"colorjitter","method_name":"ColorJitter"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dino","method_name":"DINO"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"},{"method_slug":"feedforward-network","method_name":"Feedforward Network"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"nt-xent","method_name":"NT-Xent"},{"method_slug":"random-gaussian-blur","method_name":"Random Gaussian Blur"},{"method_slug":"random-resized-crop","method_name":"Random Resized Crop"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"simclr","method_name":"SimCLR"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"vision-transformer","method_name":"Vision Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}