# Adaptive Similarity Bootstrapping for Self-Distillation based Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13606/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [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)
- [How Well Do Self-Supervised Models Transfer?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13377/) (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)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Dense Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05499/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning with Swin Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04553/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning by Predicting Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05310/) (2017)

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

- [CrIBo: Self-Supervised Learning via Cross-Image Object-Level Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07855/) (2023)
- [From Pretext to Purpose: Batch-Adaptive Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09974/) (2023)
- [Beyond Augmentation: Leveraging Inter-Instance Relation in Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22322/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most self-supervised methods for representation learning leverage a cross-view consistency objective i.e., they maximize the representation similarity of a given image's augmented views. Recent work NNCLR goes beyond the cross-view paradigm and uses positive pairs from different images obtained via nearest neighbor bootstrapping in a contrastive setting. We empirically show that as opposed to the contrastive learning setting which relies on negative samples, incorporating nearest neighbor bootstrapping in a self-distillation scheme can lead to a performance drop or even collapse. We scrutinize the reason for this unexpected behavior and provide a solution. We propose to adaptively bootstrap neighbors based on the estimated quality of the latent space. We report consistent improvements compared to the naive bootstrapping approach and the original baselines. Our approach leads to performance improvements for various self-distillation method/backbone combinations and standard downstream tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/tileb1/AdaSim.