# A Tale of Color Variants: Representation and Self-Supervised Learning in Fashion E-Commerce

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02910/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Metric Learning with Transformed Attention Consistency and Contrastive Clustering Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04378/) (2020)
- [Symmetrical Synthesis for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11658/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Deep Metric Learning via Orthogonality based Probabilistic Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09880/) (2020)
- [Large Scale Visual Recommendations From Street Fashion Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.1778/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Deep Metric Learning via Auxiliary Rotation Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07072/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.