# Siamese Image Modeling for Self-Supervised Vision Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01204/

## Key facts

- Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [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)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (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)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [MVImgNet: A Large-scale Dataset of Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06042/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)
- [Contrast with Reconstruct: Contrastive 3D Representation Learning Guided by Generative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02318/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Masked Autoencoders are Stronger Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13532/) (2022)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00173/) (2022)
- [CMID: A Unified Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09670/) (2023)
- [AdaMAE: Adaptive Masking for Efficient Spatiotemporal Learning with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09120/) (2022)
- [Know Your Self-supervised Learning: A Survey on Image-based Generative and Discriminative Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13689/) (2023)
- [A Unified View of Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10615/) (2022)
- [Towards All-in-one Pre-training via Maximizing Multi-modal Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09807/) (2022)
- [Anatomical Invariance Modeling and Semantic Alignment for Self-supervised Learning in 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05615/) (2023)
- [A simple, efficient and scalable contrastive masked autoencoder for learning visual representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16870/) (2022)
- [CAE v2: Context Autoencoder with CLIP Target](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09799/) (2022)
- [TinyMIM: An Empirical Study of Distilling MIM Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01296/) (2023)
- [Masked Modeling Duo: Learning Representations by Encouraging Both Networks to Model the Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14648/) (2022)
- [Attentive Mask CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08653/) (2022)
- [FSFM: A Generalizable Face Security Foundation Model via Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12032/) (2024)
- [Extreme Masking for Learning Instance and Distributed Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04667/) (2022)
- [ADDP: Learning General Representations for Image Recognition and Generation with Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05423/) (2023)
- [Towards Latent Masked Image Modeling for Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15837/) (2024)
- [Layer Grafted Pre-training: Bridging Contrastive Learning And Masked Image Modeling For Label-Efficient Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14138/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning with Facial Region Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02138/) (2024)
- [DeepMIM: Deep Supervision for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08817/) (2023)
- [Rejuvenating image-GPT as Strong Visual Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02147/) (2023)
- [One Leaf Reveals the Season: Occlusion-Based Contrastive Learning with Semantic-Aware Views for Efficient Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09858/) (2024)
- [Fewer Tokens, Greater Scaling: Self-Adaptive Visual Bases for Efficient and Expansive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19515/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has delivered superior performance on a variety of downstream vision tasks. Two main-stream SSL frameworks have been proposed, i.e., Instance Discrimination (ID) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM). ID pulls together representations from different views of the same image, while avoiding feature collapse. It lacks spatial sensitivity, which requires modeling the local structure within each image. On the other hand, MIM reconstructs the original content given a masked image. It instead does not have good semantic alignment, which requires projecting semantically similar views into nearby representations. To address this dilemma, we observe that (1) semantic alignment can be achieved by matching different image views with strong augmentations; (2) spatial sensitivity can benefit from predicting dense representations with masked images. Driven by these analysis, we propose Siamese Image Modeling (SiameseIM), which predicts the dense representations of an augmented view, based on another masked view from the same image but with different augmentations. SiameseIM uses a Siamese network with two branches. The online branch encodes the first view, and predicts the second view's representation according to the relative positions between these two views. The target branch produces the target by encoding the second view. SiameseIM can surpass both ID and MIM on a wide range of downstream tasks, including ImageNet finetuning and linear probing, COCO and LVIS detection, and ADE20k semantic segmentation. The improvement is more significant in few-shot, long-tail and robustness-concerned scenarios. Code shall be released at https://github.com/fundamentalvision/Siamese-Image-Modeling.