# Suppressing Static Visual Cues via Normalizing Flows for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03800/) (2020)
- [Audio-Visual Scene Analysis with Self-Supervised Multisensory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03641/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12667/) (2019)
- [Cooperative Learning of Audio and Video Models from Self-Supervised Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00230/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Inverse Problems with Invertible Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04730/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Co-training for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09709/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Sorting Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01246/) (2017)
- [Video Representation Learning by Dense Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04656/) (2019)
- [SpeedNet: Learning the Speediness in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06130/) (2020)
- [Guided Image Generation with Conditional Invertible Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02392/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Video Representation Learning by Pace Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05861/) (2020)
- [Memory-augmented Dense Predictive Coding for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01065/) (2020)
- [Why Can't I Dance in the Mall? Learning to Mitigate Scene Bias in Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05534/) (2019)
- [Video Playback Rate Perception for Self-supervisedSpatio-Temporal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11476/) (2020)
- [Invertible Image Rescaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05650/) (2020)
- [RSPNet: Relative Speed Perception for Unsupervised Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07949/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Mitigating and Evaluating Static Bias of Action Representations in the Background and the Foreground](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12883/) (2022)
- [The PanAf-FGBG Dataset: Understanding the Impact of Backgrounds in Wildlife Behaviour Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21201/) (2025)
- [Frequency Selective Augmentation for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03865/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modal Consistency Learning for Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12485/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the great progress in video understanding made by deep convolutional neural networks, feature representation learned by existing methods may be biased to static visual cues. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to suppress static visual cues (SSVC) based on probabilistic analysis for self-supervised video representation learning. In our method, video frames are first encoded to obtain latent variables under standard normal distribution via normalizing flows. By modelling static factors in a video as a random variable, the conditional distribution of each latent variable becomes shifted and scaled normal. Then, the less-varying latent variables along time are selected as static cues and suppressed to generate motion-preserved videos. Finally, positive pairs are constructed by motion-preserved videos for contrastive learning to alleviate the problem of representation bias to static cues. The less-biased video representation can be better generalized to various downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on publicly available benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state of the art when only single RGB modality is used for pre-training.