# CoDo: Contrastive Learning with Downstream Background Invariance for Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.04617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (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)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00224/) (2020)
- [DetCo: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04803/) (2021)
- [Aligning Pretraining for Detection via Object-Level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02637/) (2021)
- [Instance Localization for Self-supervised Detection Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08318/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Object-Level Representation Learning from Scene Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11952/) (2021)
- [Self-EMD: Self-Supervised Object Detection without ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13677/) (2020)
- [Distilling Localization for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06638/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Supervised Contrastive Learning on Blended Images for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11938/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Multi-Label Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23156/) (2025)
- [The Impact of Semantic Pairs on Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08722/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The prior self-supervised learning researches mainly select image-level instance discrimination as pretext task. It achieves a fantastic classification performance that is comparable to supervised learning methods. However, with degraded transfer performance on downstream tasks such as object detection. To bridge the performance gap, we propose a novel object-level self-supervised learning method, called Contrastive learning with Downstream background invariance (CoDo). The pretext task is converted to focus on instance location modeling for various backgrounds, especially for downstream datasets. The ability of background invariance is considered vital for object detection. Firstly, a data augmentation strategy is proposed to paste the instances onto background images, and then jitter the bounding box to involve background information. Secondly, we implement architecture alignment between our pretraining network and the mainstream detection pipelines. Thirdly, hierarchical and multi views contrastive learning is designed to improve performance of visual representation learning. Experiments on MSCOCO demonstrate that the proposed CoDo with common backbones, ResNet50-FPN, yields strong transfer learning results for object detection.