Neural net classifiers trained on data with annotated class labels can also capture apparent visual similarity among categories without being directed to do so. We study whether this observation can be extended beyond the conventional domain of supervised learning: Can we learn a good feature representation that captures apparent similarity among instances, instead of classes, by merely asking the feature to be discriminative of individual instances?We formulate this intuition as a non-parametric classification problem at the instance-level, and use noisecontrastive estimation to tackle the computational challenges imposed by the large number of instance classes.Our experimental results demonstrate that, under unsupervised learning settings, our method surpasses the stateof-the-art on ImageNet classification by a large margin. Our method is also remarkable for consistently improving test performance with more training data and better network architectures. By fine-tuning the learned feature, we further obtain competitive results for semi-supervised learning and object detection tasks. Our non-parametric model is highly compact: With 128 features per image, our method requires only 600MB storage for a million images, enabling fast nearest neighbour retrieval at the run time.

This paper studies the unsupervised embedding learning problem, which requires an effective similarity measurement between samples in low-dimensional embedding space. Motivated by the positive concentrated and negative separated properties observed from category-wise supervised learning, we propose to utilize the instance-wise supervision to approximate these properties, which aims at learning data augmentation invariant and instance spreadout features. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel instance based softmax embedding method, which directly optimizes the 'real' instance features on top of the softmax function. It achieves significantly faster learning speed and higher accuracy than all existing methods. The proposed method performs well for both seen and unseen testing categories with cosine similarity. It also achieves competitive performance even without pre-trained network over samples from fine-grained categories.

Unsupervised approaches to learning in neural networks are of substantial interest for furthering artificial intelligence, both because they would enable the training of networks without the need for large numbers of expensive annotations, and because they would be better models of the kind of general-purpose learning deployed by humans. However, unsupervised networks have long lagged behind the performance of their supervised counterparts, especially in the domain of large-scale visual recognition. Recent developments in training deep convolutional embeddings to maximize non-parametric instance separation and clustering objectives have shown promise in closing this gap. Here, we describe a method that trains an embedding function to maximize a metric of local aggregation, causing similar data instances to move together in the embedding space, while allowing dissimilar instances to separate. This aggregation metric is dynamic, allowing soft clusters of different scales to emerge. We evaluate our procedure on several large-scale visual recognition datasets, achieving state-of-the-art unsupervised transfer learning performance on object recognition in ImageNet, scene recognition in Places 205, and object detection in PASCAL VOC.

This paper presents Prototypical Contrastive Learning (PCL), an unsupervised representation learning method that bridges contrastive learning with clustering. PCL not only learns low-level features for the task of instance discrimination, but more importantly, it encodes semantic structures discovered by clustering into the learned embedding space. Specifically, we introduce prototypes as latent variables to help find the maximum-likelihood estimation of the network parameters in an Expectation-Maximization framework. We iteratively perform E-step as finding the distribution of prototypes via clustering and M-step as optimizing the network via contrastive learning. We propose ProtoNCE loss, a generalized version of the InfoNCE loss for contrastive learning, which encourages representations to be closer to their assigned prototypes. PCL outperforms state-of-the-art instance-wise contrastive learning methods on multiple benchmarks with substantial improvement in low-resource transfer learning. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/salesforce/PCL.

Unsupervised image representations have significantly reduced the gap with supervised pretraining, notably with the recent achievements of contrastive learning methods. These contrastive methods typically work online and rely on a large number of explicit pairwise feature comparisons, which is computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose an online algorithm, SwAV, that takes advantage of contrastive methods without requiring to compute pairwise comparisons. Specifically, our method simultaneously clusters the data while enforcing consistency between cluster assignments produced for different augmentations (or "views") of the same image, instead of comparing features directly as in contrastive learning. Simply put, we use a "swapped" prediction mechanism where we predict the code of a view from the representation of another view. Our method can be trained with large and small batches and can scale to unlimited amounts of data. Compared to previous contrastive methods, our method is more memory efficient since it does not require a large memory bank or a special momentum network. In addition, we also propose a new data augmentation strategy, multi-crop, that uses a mix of views with different resolutions in place of two full-resolution views, without increasing the memory or compute requirements. We validate our findings by achieving 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with ResNet-50, as well as surpassing supervised pretraining on all the considered transfer tasks.

The goal of self-supervised learning from images is to construct image representations that are semantically meaningful via pretext tasks that do not require semantic annotations. Many pretext tasks lead to representations that are covariant with image transformations. We argue that, instead, semantic representations ought to be invariant under such transformations. Specifically, we develop Pretext-Invariant Representation Learning (PIRL, pronounced as "pearl") that learns invariant representations based on pretext tasks. We use PIRL with a commonly used pretext task that involves solving jigsaw puzzles. We find that PIRL substantially improves the semantic quality of the learned image representations. Our approach sets a new stateof-the-art in self-supervised learning from images on several popular benchmarks for self-supervised learning. Despite being unsupervised, PIRL outperforms supervised pre-training in learning image representations for object detection. Altogether, our results demonstrate the potential of self-supervised representations with good invariance properties.

神经网络分类器已成为当前“火车前的Fine-Tune”范例的De-Facto选择。在本文中，我们调查了K $ -Nearest邻居（K-NN）分类器，这是一种从预先学习时代的无古典无模型学习方法，作为基于现代神经网络的方法的增强。作为懒惰的学习方法，K-Nn简单地聚集了训练集中的测试图像和顶-k邻居之间的距离。我们采用k-nn具有由监督或自我监督方法产生的预训练的视觉表现，分为两个步骤：（1）利用K-NN预测概率作为培训期间容易\〜〜硬示例的迹象。 （2）用增强分类器的预测分布线性地插入k-nn。通过广泛的实验在广泛的分类任务中，我们的研究揭示了K-NN集成与额外见解的一般性和灵活性：（1）K-NN实现竞争结果，有时甚至优于标准的线性分类器。 （2）结合K-NN对参数分类器执行不良和/或低数据制度的任务特别有益。我们希望这些发现将鼓励人们重新考虑预先学习的角色，计算机愿景中的古典方法。我们的代码可用于：https：//github.com/kmnp/nn-revisit。

我们研究了用于半监控学习（SSL）的无监督数据选择，其中可以提供大规模的未标记数据集，并且为标签采集预算小额数据子集。现有的SSL方法专注于学习一个有效地集成了来自给定小标记数据和大型未标记数据的信息的模型，而我们专注于选择正确的数据以用于SSL的注释，而无需任何标签或任务信息。直观地，要标记的实例应统称为下游任务的最大多样性和覆盖范围，并且单独具有用于SSL的最大信息传播实用程序。我们以三步数据为中心的SSL方法形式化这些概念，使稳定性和精度的纤维液改善8％的CiFar-10（标记为0.08％）和14％的Imagenet -1k（标记为0.2％）。它也是一种具有各种SSL方法的通用框架，提供一致的性能增益。我们的工作表明，在仔细选择注释数据上花费的小计算带来了大注释效率和模型性能增益，而无需改变学习管道。我们完全无监督的数据选择可以轻松扩展到其他弱监督的学习设置。

Human observers can learn to recognize new categories of images from a handful of examples, yet doing so with artificial ones remains an open challenge. We hypothesize that data-efficient recognition is enabled by representations which make the variability in natural signals more predictable. We therefore revisit and improve Contrastive Predictive Coding, an unsupervised objective for learning such representations. This new implementation produces features which support state-of-theart linear classification accuracy on the ImageNet dataset. When used as input for non-linear classification with deep neural networks, this representation allows us to use 2-5× less labels than classifiers trained directly on image pixels. Finally, this unsupervised representation substantially improves transfer learning to object detection on the PASCAL VOC dataset, surpassing fully supervised pre-trained ImageNet classifiers.

Clustering is a class of unsupervised learning methods that has been extensively applied and studied in computer vision. Little work has been done to adapt it to the end-to-end training of visual features on large scale datasets. In this work, we present DeepCluster, a clustering method that jointly learns the parameters of a neural network and the cluster assignments of the resulting features. DeepCluster iteratively groups the features with a standard clustering algorithm, kmeans, and uses the subsequent assignments as supervision to update the weights of the network. We apply DeepCluster to the unsupervised training of convolutional neural networks on large datasets like ImageNet and YFCC100M. The resulting model outperforms the current state of the art by a significant margin on all the standard benchmarks.

Jitendra Malik once said, "Supervision is the opium of the AI researcher". Most deep learning techniques heavily rely on extreme amounts of human labels to work effectively. In today's world, the rate of data creation greatly surpasses the rate of data annotation. Full reliance on human annotations is just a temporary means to solve current closed problems in AI. In reality, only a tiny fraction of data is annotated. Annotation Efficient Learning (AEL) is a study of algorithms to train models effectively with fewer annotations. To thrive in AEL environments, we need deep learning techniques that rely less on manual annotations (e.g., image, bounding-box, and per-pixel labels), but learn useful information from unlabeled data. In this thesis, we explore five different techniques for handling AEL.

Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual representations.Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision. That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to the same object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52% mAP (no bounding box regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4%. We also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other tasks such as surface-normal estimation.

Despite significant advances, the performance of state-of-the-art continual learning approaches hinges on the unrealistic scenario of fully labeled data. In this paper, we tackle this challenge and propose an approach for continual semi-supervised learning -- a setting where not all the data samples are labeled. An underlying issue in this scenario is the model forgetting representations of unlabeled data and overfitting the labeled ones. We leverage the power of nearest-neighbor classifiers to non-linearly partition the feature space and learn a strong representation for the current task, as well as distill relevant information from previous tasks. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation and show that our method outperforms all the existing approaches by large margins, setting a strong state of the art on the continual semi-supervised learning paradigm. For example, on CIFAR100 we surpass several others even when using at least 30 times less supervision (0.8% vs. 25% of annotations).

We introduce Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL), a new approach to self-supervised image representation learning. BYOL relies on two neural networks, referred to as online and target networks, that interact and learn from each other. From an augmented view of an image, we train the online network to predict the target network representation of the same image under a different augmented view. At the same time, we update the target network with a slow-moving average of the online network. While state-of-the art methods rely on negative pairs, BYOL achieves a new state of the art without them. BYOL reaches 74.3% top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet using a linear evaluation with a ResNet-50 architecture and 79.6% with a larger ResNet. We show that BYOL performs on par or better than the current state of the art on both transfer and semi-supervised benchmarks. Our implementation and pretrained models are given on GitHub. 3 * Equal contribution; the order of first authors was randomly selected.

现代ML方法在培训数据是IID，大规模和良好标记的时候Excel。在不太理想的条件下学习仍然是一个开放的挑战。在不利条件下，几次射击，持续的，转移和代表学习的子场在学习中取得了很大的进步;通过方法和见解，每个都提供了独特的优势。这些方法解决了不同的挑战，例如依次到达的数据或稀缺的训练示例，然而，在部署之前，ML系统将面临困难的条件。因此，需要可以处理实际设置中许多学习挑战的一般ML系统。为了促进一般ML方法目标的研究，我们介绍了一个新的统一评估框架 - 流体（灵活的顺序数据）。流体集成了几次拍摄，持续的，转移和表示学习的目标，同时能够比较和整合这些子场的技术。在流体中，学习者面临数据流，并且必须在选择如何更新自身时进行顺序预测，快速调整到新颖的类别，并处理更改的数据分布;虽然会计计算总额。我们对广泛的方法进行实验，这些方法阐述了新的洞察当前解决方案的优缺点并表明解决了新的研究问题。作为更一般方法的起点，我们展示了两种新的基线，其在流体上优于其他评估的方法。项目页面：https：//raivn.cs.washington.edu/projects/fluid/。

使用超越欧几里德距离的神经网络，深入的Bregman分歧测量数据点的分歧，并且能够捕获分布的发散。在本文中，我们提出了深深的布利曼对视觉表现的对比学习的分歧，我们的目标是通过基于功能Bregman分歧培训额外的网络来提高自我监督学习中使用的对比损失。与完全基于单点之间的分歧的传统对比学学习方法相比，我们的框架可以捕获分布之间的发散，这提高了学习表示的质量。我们展示了传统的对比损失和我们提出的分歧损失优于基线的结合，并且最先前的自我监督和半监督学习的大多数方法在多个分类和对象检测任务和数据集中。此外，学习的陈述在转移到其他数据集和任务时概括了良好。源代码和我们的型号可用于补充，并将通过纸张释放。

元学习已成为几乎没有图像分类的实用方法，在该方法中，“学习分类器的策略”是在标记的基础类别上进行元学习的，并且可以应用于具有新颖类的任务。我们删除了基类标签的要求，并通过无监督的元学习（UML）学习可通用的嵌入。具体而言，任务发作是在元训练过程中使用未标记的基本类别的数据增强构建的，并且我们将基于嵌入式的分类器应用于新的任务，并在元测试期间使用标记的少量示例。我们观察到两个元素在UML中扮演着重要角色，即进行样本任务和衡量实例之间的相似性的方法。因此，我们获得了具有两个简单修改的​​强基线 - 一个足够的采样策略，每情节有效地构建多个任务以及半分解的相似性。然后，我们利用来自两个方向的任务特征以获得进一步的改进。首先，合成的混淆实例被合并以帮助提取更多的判别嵌入。其次，我们利用额外的特定任务嵌入转换作为元训练期间的辅助组件，以促进预先适应的嵌入式的概括能力。几乎没有学习基准的实验证明，我们的方法比以前的UML方法优于先前的UML方法，并且比其监督变体获得了可比甚至更好的性能。

Self-supervised learning aims to learn representations from the data itself without explicit manual supervision. Existing efforts ignore a crucial aspect of self-supervised learning -the ability to scale to large amount of data because self-supervision requires no manual labels. In this work, we revisit this principle and scale two popular selfsupervised approaches to 100 million images. We show that by scaling on various axes (including data size and problem 'hardness'), one can largely match or even exceed the performance of supervised pre-training on a variety of tasks such as object detection, surface normal estimation (3D) and visual navigation using reinforcement learning. Scaling these methods also provides many interesting insights into the limitations of current self-supervised techniques and evaluations. We conclude that current self-supervised methods are not 'hard' enough to take full advantage of large scale data and do not seem to learn effective high level semantic representations. We also introduce an extensive benchmark across 9 different datasets and tasks. We believe that such a benchmark along with comparable evaluation settings is necessary to make meaningful progress.

Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training Con-vNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4% that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: https://github.com/gidariss/FeatureLearningRotNet.

This work tackles the problem of semi-supervised learning of image classifiers. Our main insight is that the field of semi-supervised learning can benefit from the quickly advancing field of self-supervised visual representation learning. Unifying these two approaches, we propose the framework of self-supervised semi-supervised learning (S 4 L) and use it to derive two novel semi-supervised image classification methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in comparison to both carefully tuned baselines, and existing semi-supervised learning methods. We then show that S 4 L and existing semi-supervised methods can be jointly trained, yielding a new state-of-the-art result on semi-supervised ILSVRC-2012 with 10% of labels.