# The Geometry of Self-supervised Learning Models and its Impact on Transfer Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08622/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09348/) (2021)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Occam's Razor for Self Supervised Learning: What is Sufficient to Learn Good Representations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10743/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Learning on a DIET: Datum IndEx as Target Free of Self-Supervision, Reconstruction, Projector Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10260/) (2023)
- [Large Vision Models Can Solve Mental Rotation Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15271/) (2025)
- [Study of Manifold Geometry using Multiscale Non-Negative Kernel Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17475/) (2022)
- [The Bad Batches: Enhancing Self-Supervised Learning in Image Classification Through Representative Batch Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19579/) (2024)
- [HQ-JEPA: Hybrid Quantum Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Cross-Modal Remote Sensing Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31068/) (2026)
- [Geometry-Aware Graph Construction via Adaptive Spectral Bandwidth Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a desirable paradigm in computer vision due to the inability of supervised models to learn representations that can generalize in domains with limited labels. The recent popularity of SSL has led to the development of several models that make use of diverse training strategies, architectures, and data augmentation policies with no existing unified framework to study or assess their effectiveness in transfer learning. We propose a data-driven geometric strategy to analyze different SSL models using local neighborhoods in the feature space induced by each. Unlike existing approaches that consider mathematical approximations of the parameters, individual components, or optimization landscape, our work aims to explore the geometric properties of the representation manifolds learned by SSL models. Our proposed manifold graph metrics (MGMs) provide insights into the geometric similarities and differences between available SSL models, their invariances with respect to specific augmentations, and their performances on transfer learning tasks. Our key findings are two fold: (i) contrary to popular belief, the geometry of SSL models is not tied to its training paradigm (contrastive, non-contrastive, and cluster-based); (ii) we can predict the transfer learning capability for a specific model based on the geometric properties of its semantic and augmentation manifolds.