# VICRegL: Self-Supervised Learning of Local Visual Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01571/

## Key facts

- Cited by 118 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [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)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03888/) (2017)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [Propagate Yourself: Exploring Pixel-Level Consistency for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10043/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07922/) (2020)
- [Efficient Visual Pretraining with Contrastive Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10957/) (2021)
- [Efficient Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09785/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 118)

- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03860/) (2022)
- [Exposing flaws of generative model evaluation metrics and their unfair treatment of diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04675/) (2023)
- [CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00566/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing the Mind's Eye: fMRI-to-Image with Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18274/) (2023)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14482/) (2026)
- [MindEye2: Shared-Subject Models Enable fMRI-To-Image With 1 Hour of Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11207/) (2024)
- [Battle of the Backbones: A Large-Scale Comparison of Pretrained Models across Computer Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19909/) (2023)
- [Learning and Leveraging World Models in Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00504/) (2024)
- [LVM-Med: Learning Large-Scale Self-Supervised Vision Models for Medical Imaging via Second-order Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11925/) (2023)
- [MC-JEPA: A Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Self-Supervised Learning of Motion and Content Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12698/) (2023)
- [A-JEPA: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Can Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15830/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised learning of Split Invariant Equivariant representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10283/) (2023)
- [SpectralEarth: Training Hyperspectral Foundation Models at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08447/) (2024)
- [Know Your Self-supervised Learning: A Survey on Image-based Generative and Discriminative Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13689/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Role of the Projector in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11098/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Learning with Lie Symmetries for Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05432/) (2023)
- [For Pre-Trained Vision Models in Motor Control, Not All Policy Learning Methods are Created Equal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04591/) (2023)
- [CrOC: Cross-View Online Clustering for Dense Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13245/) (2023)
- [Advancing Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation via Global-Local Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08913/) (2023)
- [Location-Aware Self-Supervised Transformers for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02400/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised learning made simple with self-supervised clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07483/) (2023)
- [vox2vec: A Framework for Self-supervised Contrastive Learning of Voxel-level Representations in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14725/) (2023)
- [CrIBo: Self-Supervised Learning via Cross-Image Object-Level Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07855/) (2023)
- [Neural Eigenfunctions Are Structured Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12637/) (2022)
- [Sequential Multi-Dimensional Self-Supervised Learning for Clinical Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10923/) (2023)
- [InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24012/) (2026)
- [Feed-Forward SceneDINO for Unsupervised Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06230/) (2025)
- [Stochastic positional embeddings improve masked image modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00566/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most recent self-supervised methods for learning image representations focus on either producing a global feature with invariance properties, or producing a set of local features. The former works best for classification tasks while the latter is best for detection and segmentation tasks. This paper explores the fundamental trade-off between learning local and global features. A new method called VICRegL is proposed that learns good global and local features simultaneously, yielding excellent performance on detection and segmentation tasks while maintaining good performance on classification tasks. Concretely, two identical branches of a standard convolutional net architecture are fed two differently distorted versions of the same image. The VICReg criterion is applied to pairs of global feature vectors. Simultaneously, the VICReg criterion is applied to pairs of local feature vectors occurring before the last pooling layer. Two local feature vectors are attracted to each other if their l2-distance is below a threshold or if their relative locations are consistent with a known geometric transformation between the two input images. We demonstrate strong performance on linear classification and segmentation transfer tasks. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/VICRegL