Papers › Self-supervised Pre-training with Hard Examples Improves Visual Representations

Self-supervised Pre-training with Hard Examples Improves Visual Representations

25 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.13493archive 2025-07-28

Chunyuan Li, Xiujun Li, Lei Zhang, Baolin Peng, Mingyuan Zhou, Jianfeng Gao

Self-supervised pre-training (SSP) employs random image transformations to generate training data for visual representation learning. In this paper, we first present a modeling framework that unifies existing SSP methods as learning to predict pseudo-labels. Then, we propose new data augmentation methods of generating training examples whose pseudo-labels are harder to predict than those generated via random image transformations. Specifically, we use adversarial training and CutMix to create hard examples (HEXA) to be used as augmented views for MoCo-v2 and DeepCluster-v2, leading to two variants HEXA_{MoCo} and HEXA_{DCluster}, respectively. In our experiments, we pre-train models on ImageNet and evaluate them on multiple public benchmarks. Our evaluation shows that the two new algorithm variants outperform their original counterparts, and achieve new state-of-the-art on a wide range of tasks where limited task supervision is available for fine-tuning. These results verify that hard examples are instrumental in improving the generalization of the pre-trained models.

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Tasks

Data AugmentationRepresentation LearningSelf-Supervised Image Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet HEXA Number of Params 24M #72 of 144 Archive leaderboard report
Self-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet HEXA Top 1 Accuracy 75.5% #72 of 144 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

CutMix

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