How Useful is Self-Supervised Pretraining for Visual Tasks?

Recent advances have spurred incredible progress in self-supervised pretraining for vision. We investigate what factors may play a role in the utility of these pretraining methods for practitioners. To do this, we evaluate various self-supervised algorithms across a comprehensive array of synthetic datasets and downstream tasks. We prepare a suite of synthetic data that enables an endless supply of annotated images as well as full control over dataset difficulty. Our experiments offer insights into how the utility of self-supervision changes as the number of available labels grows as well as how the utility changes as a function of the downstream task and the properties of the training data. We also find that linear evaluation does not correlate with finetuning performance. Code and data is available at \href{https://www.github.com/princeton-vl/selfstudy}{github.com/princeton-vl/selfstudy}.Comment: To appear in CVPR 202

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Large-Scale Point Cloud

Existing methods for large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation require expensive, tedious and error-prone manual point-wise annotations. Intuitively, weakly supervised training is a direct solution to reduce the cost of labeling. However, for weakly supervised large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation, too few annotations will inevitably lead to ineffective learning of network. We propose an effective weakly supervised method containing two components to solve the above problem. Firstly, we construct a pretext task, \textit{i.e.,} point cloud colorization, with a self-supervised learning to transfer the learned prior knowledge from a large amount of unlabeled point cloud to a weakly supervised network. In this way, the representation capability of the weakly supervised network can be improved by the guidance from a heterogeneous task. Besides, to generate pseudo label for unlabeled data, a sparse label propagation mechanism is proposed with the help of generated class prototypes, which is used to measure the classification confidence of unlabeled point. Our method is evaluated on large-scale point cloud datasets with different scenarios including indoor and outdoor. The experimental results show the large gain against existing weakly supervised and comparable results to fully supervised methods\footnote{Code based on mindspore: https://github.com/dmcv-ecnu/MindSpore\_ModelZoo/tree/main/WS3\_MindSpore}

Siamese-Network Based Signature Verification using Self Supervised Learning

The use of signatures is often encountered in various public documents ranging from academic documents to business documents that are a sign that the existence of signatures is crucial in various administrative processes. The frequent use of signatures does not mean a procedure without loopholes, but we must remain vigilant against signature falsification carried out with various motives behind it. Therefore, in this study, a signature verification system was developed that could prevent the falsification of signatures in public documents by using digital imagery of existing signatures. This study used neural networks with siamese network-based architectures that also empower self-supervised learning techniques to improve accuracy in the realm of limited data. The final evaluation of the machine learning method used gets a maximum accuracy of 83% and this result is better than the machine learning model that does not involve self-supervised learning methods

Benchmarking Representation Learning for Natural World Image Collections

Recent progress in self-supervised learning has resulted in models that are capable of extracting rich representations from image collections without requiring any explicit label supervision. However, to date the vast majority of these approaches have restricted themselves to training on standard benchmark datasets such as ImageNet. We argue that fine-grained visual categorization problems, such as plant and animal species classification, provide an informative testbed for self-supervised learning. In order to facilitate progress in this area we present two new natural world visual classification datasets, iNat2021 and NeWT. The former consists of 2.7M images from 10k different species uploaded by users of the citizen science application iNaturalist. We designed the latter, NeWT, in collaboration with domain experts with the aim of benchmarking the performance of representation learning algorithms on a suite of challenging natural world binary classification tasks that go beyond standard species classification. These two new datasets allow us to explore questions related to large-scale representation and transfer learning in the context of fine-grained categories. We provide a comprehensive analysis of feature extractors trained with and without supervision on ImageNet and iNat2021, shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses of different learned features across a diverse set of tasks. We find that features produced by standard supervised methods still outperform those produced by self-supervised approaches such as SimCLR. However, improved self-supervised learning methods are constantly being released and the iNat2021 and NeWT datasets are a valuable resource for tracking their progress.Comment: CVPR 202

Learning Visual Representations for Transfer Learning by Suppressing Texture

Recent literature has shown that features obtained from supervised training of CNNs may over-emphasize texture rather than encoding high-level information. In self-supervised learning in particular, texture as a low-level cue may provide shortcuts that prevent the network from learning higher level representations. To address these problems we propose to use classic methods based on anisotropic diffusion to augment training using images with suppressed texture. This simple method helps retain important edge information and suppress texture at the same time. We empirically show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on object detection and image classification with eight diverse datasets in either supervised or self-supervised learning tasks such as MoCoV2 and Jigsaw. Our method is particularly effective for transfer learning tasks and we observed improved performance on five standard transfer learning datasets. The large improvements (up to 11.49\%) on the Sketch-ImageNet dataset, DTD dataset and additional visual analyses with saliency maps suggest that our approach helps in learning better representations that better transfer

Overwriting Pretrained Bias with Finetuning Data

Transfer learning is beneficial by allowing the expressive features of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to be finetuned for the target task of smaller, more domain-specific datasets. However, there is a concern that these pretrained models may come with their own biases which would propagate into the finetuned model. In this work, we investigate bias when conceptualized as both spurious correlations between the target task and a sensitive attribute as well as underrepresentation of a particular group in the dataset. Under both notions of bias, we find that (1) models finetuned on top of pretrained models can indeed inherit their biases, but (2) this bias can be corrected for through relatively minor interventions to the finetuning dataset, and often with a negligible impact to performance. Our findings imply that careful curation of the finetuning dataset is important for reducing biases on a downstream task, and doing so can even compensate for bias in the pretrained model.Comment: ICCV 2023 Ora