# Directional Self-supervised Learning for Heavy Image Augmentations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [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)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13625/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Embedding Learning via Invariant and Spreading Instance Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03436/) (2019)
- [Local Aggregation for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12355/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning with Stronger Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07713/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Deep Learning by Neighbourhood Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11567/) (2019)
- [UniformAugment: A Search-free Probabilistic Data Augmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14348/) (2020)
- [Joint Contrastive Learning with Infinite Possibilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14776/) (2020)
- [3D Human Shape and Pose from a Single Low-Resolution Image with Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13666/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Hierarchical Consistent Contrastive Learning for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Growing Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13466/) (2022)
- [Prompted Contrast with Masked Motion Modeling: Towards Versatile 3D Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03975/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-aware Unsupervised Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15409/) (2023)
- [More Synergy, Less Redundancy: Exploiting Joint Mutual Information for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00651/) (2023)
- [Unilaterally Aggregated Contrastive Learning with Hierarchical Augmentation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10155/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Representation Learning: A Benchmark and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02978/) (2024)
- [EnSiam: Self-Supervised Learning With Ensemble Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13391/) (2023)
- [Direct Coloring for Self-Supervised Enhanced Feature Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02109/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Self-Supervised Learning Within the Framework of Partial Information Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02121/) (2024)
- [GUESS: Generative Uncertainty Ensemble for Self Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02896/) (2024)
- [Enhanced MLLM Black-Box Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21214/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the large augmentation family, only a few cherry-picked robust augmentation policies are beneficial to self-supervised image representation learning. In this paper, we propose a directional self-supervised learning paradigm (DSSL), which is compatible with significantly more augmentations. Specifically, we adapt heavy augmentation policies after the views lightly augmented by standard augmentations, to generate harder view (HV). HV usually has a higher deviation from the original image than the lightly augmented standard view (SV). Unlike previous methods equally pairing all augmented views to symmetrically maximize their similarities, DSSL treats augmented views of the same instance as a partially ordered set (with directions as SVleftrightarrow SV, SVleftarrowHV), and then equips a directional objective function respecting to the derived relationships among views. DSSL can be easily implemented with a few lines of codes and is highly flexible to popular self-supervised learning frameworks, including SimCLR, SimSiam, BYOL. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR and ImageNet demonstrated that DSSL can stably improve various baselines with compatibility to a wider range of augmentations.