A Large-Scale Study on Unsupervised Spatiotemporal Representation Learning
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
Key facts. Cited by 214 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 75 of its 96 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2021.
Builds on
75 of 96 references.
References · 75
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 31; 2022: 71; 2023: 48; 2024: 35; 2025: 22; 2026: 7.
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