Papers › Towards Democratizing Joint-Embedding Self-Supervised Learning

Towards Democratizing Joint-Embedding Self-Supervised Learning

3 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.01986archive 2025-07-28

Florian Bordes, Randall Balestriero, Pascal Vincent

Joint Embedding Self-Supervised Learning (JE-SSL) has seen rapid developments in recent years, due to its promise to effectively leverage large unlabeled data. The development of JE-SSL methods was driven primarily by the search for ever increasing downstream classification accuracies, using huge computational resources, and typically built upon insights and intuitions inherited from a close parent JE-SSL method. This has led unwittingly to numerous pre-conceived ideas that carried over across methods e.g. that SimCLR requires very large mini batches to yield competitive accuracies; that strong and computationally slow data augmentations are required. In this work, we debunk several such ill-formed a priori ideas in the hope to unleash the full potential of JE-SSL free of unnecessary limitations. In fact, when carefully evaluating performances across different downstream tasks and properly optimizing hyper-parameters of the methods, we most often -- if not always -- see that these widespread misconceptions do not hold. For example we show that it is possible to train SimCLR to learn useful representations, while using a single image patch as negative example, and simple Gaussian noise as the only data augmentation for the positive pair. Along these lines, in the hope to democratize JE-SSL and to allow researchers to easily make more extensive evaluations of their methods, we introduce an optimized PyTorch library for SSL.

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facebookresearch/ffcv-ssl officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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1ran · violated contract
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gather_center facebookresearch/ffcv-ssl/examples/train_ssl.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · fc2c59422af9d93e · report
exclude_bias_and_norm identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · violated contract fingerprinted licence of this copy not recorded · 28c640db8f721c0d · report
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Tasks

Data AugmentationMisconceptionsSelf-Supervised Learning

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Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockColorJitterConvolutionDense ConnectionsFeedforward NetworkGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingNT-XentRandom Gaussian BlurRandom Resized CropReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionSimCLR

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