# Rethinking Self-supervised Correspondence Learning: A Video Frame-level Similarity Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.17263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 81 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16009/) (2024)
- [Siamese Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14344/) (2023)
- [DINO-Tracker: Taming DINO for Self-Supervised Point Tracking in a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14548/) (2024)
- [Do Different Tracking Tasks Require Different Appearance Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02156/) (2021)
- [MC-JEPA: A Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Self-Supervised Learning of Motion and Content Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12698/) (2023)
- [Matching Anything by Segmenting Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04221/) (2024)
- [TAPTR: Tracking Any Point with Transformers as Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13042/) (2024)
- [TransFGU: A Top-down Approach to Fine-Grained Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01515/) (2021)
- [Learning Pixel Trajectories with Multiscale Contrastive Random Walks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08379/) (2022)
- [Emergent Temporal Correspondences from Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17220/) (2025)
- [Locality-Aware Inter-and Intra-Video Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14333/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Geometric Correspondence for Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07199/) (2022)
- [DropMAE: Learning Representations via Masked Autoencoders with Spatial-Attention Dropout for Temporal Matching Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00571/) (2023)
- [For Pre-Trained Vision Models in Motor Control, Not All Policy Learning Methods are Created Equal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04591/) (2023)
- [Boosting Video Object Segmentation via Space-time Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06211/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised video pretraining yields robust and more human-aligned visual representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06433/) (2022)
- [Semantics Meets Temporal Correspondence: Self-supervised Object-centric Learning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09951/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning of Image Representations with Cross-Video Cycle-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06463/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Technique for Human Parsing: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00394/) (2023)
- [CoordGAN: Self-Supervised Dense Correspondences Emerge from GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16521/) (2022)
- [Unified Mask Embedding and Correspondence Learning for Self-Supervised Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10100/) (2023)
- [Contextualized Spatio-Temporal Contrastive Learning with Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05181/) (2021)
- [Time to augment self-supervised visual representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13492/) (2022)
- [Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12218/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning a good representation for space-time correspondence is the key for various computer vision tasks, including tracking object bounding boxes and performing video object pixel segmentation. To learn generalizable representation for correspondence in large-scale, a variety of self-supervised pretext tasks are proposed to explicitly perform object-level or patch-level similarity learning. Instead of following the previous literature, we propose to learn correspondence using Video Frame-level Similarity (VFS) learning, i.e, simply learning from comparing video frames. Our work is inspired by the recent success in image-level contrastive learning and similarity learning for visual recognition. Our hypothesis is that if the representation is good for recognition, it requires the convolutional features to find correspondence between similar objects or parts. Our experiments show surprising results that VFS surpasses state-of-the-art self-supervised approaches for both OTB visual object tracking and DAVIS video object segmentation. We perform detailed analysis on what matters in VFS and reveals new properties on image and frame level similarity learning. Project page with code is available at https://jerryxu.net/VFS