# Self-Supervised Learning for Videos: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00419 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00419/

## Key facts

- Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 164 of its 218 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 164)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [Large Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10196/) (2023)
- [To Compress or Not to Compress- Self-Supervised Learning and Information Theory: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09355/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Foundation Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10729/) (2024)
- [Test of Time: Instilling Video-Language Models with a Sense of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02074/) (2023)
- [Procedure-Aware Pretraining for Instructional Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18230/) (2023)
- [Learning Fine-grained View-Invariant Representations from Unpaired Ego-Exo Videos via Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05526/) (2023)
- [Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19664/) (2024)
- [Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05615/) (2024)
- [XKD: Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation with Domain Alignment for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13929/) (2022)
- [OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15421/) (2024)
- [Towards Graph Contrastive Learning: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11868/) (2024)
- [N-Shot Benchmarking of Whisper on Diverse Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02902/) (2023)
- [From Google Gemini to OpenAI Q* (Q-Star): A Survey of Reshaping the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10868/) (2023)
- [From Words to Actions: Unveiling the Theoretical Underpinnings of LLM-Driven Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19883/) (2024)
- [TimeBalance: Temporally-Invariant and Temporally-Distinctive Video Representations for Semi-Supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16268/) (2023)
- [Strategies for Pretraining Neural Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08473/) (2024)
- [Tubelet-Contrastive Self-Supervision for Video-Efficient Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11003/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised visual learning in the low-data regime: a comparative evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17202/) (2024)
- [Chirality in Action: Time-Aware Video Representation Learning by Latent Straightening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08502/) (2025)
- [Language-based Action Concept Spaces Improve Video Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10922/) (2023)
- [Semi-supervised Active Learning for Video Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07169/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Geospatial Objects: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12133/) (2024)
- [A Survey of the Self Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17059/) (2024)
- [ChatGPT-Like Large-Scale Foundation Models for Prognostics and Health Management: A Survey and Roadmaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06472/) (2023)
- [FairDgcl: Fairness-aware Recommendation with Dynamic Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17555/) (2024)
- [Scaling Representation Learning from Ubiquitous ECG with State-Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15292/) (2023)
- [Symmetric Graph Contrastive Learning against Noisy Views for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02691/) (2024)
- [MV2MAE: Multi-View Video Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15900/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The remarkable success of deep learning in various domains relies on the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. However, obtaining annotations is expensive and requires great effort, which is especially challenging for videos. Moreover, the use of human-generated annotations leads to models with biased learning and poor domain generalization and robustness. As an alternative, self-supervised learning provides a way for representation learning which does not require annotations and has shown promise in both image and video domains. Different from the image domain, learning video representations are more challenging due to the temporal dimension, bringing in motion and other environmental dynamics. This also provides opportunities for video-exclusive ideas that advance self-supervised learning in the video and multimodal domain. In this survey, we provide a review of existing approaches on self-supervised learning focusing on the video domain. We summarize these methods into four different categories based on their learning objectives: 1) pretext tasks, 2) generative learning, 3) contrastive learning, and 4) cross-modal agreement. We further introduce the commonly used datasets, downstream evaluation tasks, insights into the limitations of existing works, and the potential future directions in this area.