# Effective Self-supervised Pre-training on Low-compute Networks without Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02808 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02808/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (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)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [SEED: Self-supervised Distillation For Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04731/) (2021)
- [An Analysis of Scale Invariance in Object Detection - SNIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08189/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning of Visual Features by Non-Parametrically Predicting View Assignments with Support Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13963/) (2021)
- [ReSSL: Relational Self-Supervised Learning with Weak Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09282/) (2021)
- [CompRess: Self-Supervised Learning by Compressing Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14713/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Contrastive Methods for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05967/) (2021)
- [DisCo: Remedy Self-supervised Learning on Lightweight Models with Distilled Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09124/) (2021)
- [Distill on the Go: Online knowledge distillation in self-supervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09866/) (2021)
- [SimReg: Regression as a Simple Yet Effective Tool for Self-supervised Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05131/) (2022)

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

- [SIESTA: Efficient Online Continual Learning with Sleep](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10725/) (2023)
- [A Simple Recipe for Competitive Low-compute Self supervised Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09451/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Identifying Defects in Sewer Footage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02140/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the impressive progress of self-supervised learning (SSL), its applicability to low-compute networks has received limited attention. Reported performance has trailed behind standard supervised pre-training by a large margin, barring self-supervised learning from making an impact on models that are deployed on device. Most prior works attribute this poor performance to the capacity bottleneck of the low-compute networks and opt to bypass the problem through the use of knowledge distillation (KD). In this work, we revisit SSL for efficient neural networks, taking a closer at what are the detrimental factors causing the practical limitations, and whether they are intrinsic to the self-supervised low-compute setting. We find that, contrary to accepted knowledge, there is no intrinsic architectural bottleneck, we diagnose that the performance bottleneck is related to the model complexity vs regularization strength trade-off. In particular, we start by empirically observing that the use of local views can have a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of the SSL methods. This hints at view sampling being one of the performance bottlenecks for SSL on low-capacity networks. We hypothesize that the view sampling strategy for large neural networks, which requires matching views in very diverse spatial scales and contexts, is too demanding for low-capacity architectures. We systematize the design of the view sampling mechanism, leading to a new training methodology that consistently improves the performance across different SSL methods (e.g. MoCo-v2, SwAV, DINO), different low-size networks (e.g. MobileNetV2, ResNet18, ResNet34, ViT-Ti), and different tasks (linear probe, object detection, instance segmentation and semi-supervised learning). Our best models establish a new state-of-the-art for SSL methods on low-compute networks despite not using a KD loss term.