# Evaluating The Robustness of Self-Supervised Representations to Background/Foreground Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01398/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Pretraining of Visual Features in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01988/) (2021)
- [Demystifying Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: Invariances, Augmentations and Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13916/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning from Hierarchical Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03044/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Deep Visual Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11296/) (2022)
- [Selfie: Self-supervised Pretraining for Image Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02940/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Visual Representations Learning by Contrastive Mask Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07954/) (2021)
- [A surprisingly simple technique to control the pretraining bias for better transfer: Expand or Narrow your representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05369/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite impressive empirical advances of SSL in solving various tasks, the problem of understanding and characterizing SSL representations learned from input data remains relatively under-explored. We provide a comparative analysis of how the representations produced by SSL models differ when masking parts of the input. Specifically, we considered state-of-the-art SSL pretrained models, such as DINOv2, MAE, and SwaV, and analyzed changes at the representation levels across 4 Image Classification datasets. First, we generate variations of the datasets by applying foreground and background segmentation. Then, we conduct statistical analysis using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) to evaluate the robustness of the representations learned in SSL models. Empirically, we show that not all models lead to representations that separate foreground, background, and complete images. Furthermore, we test different masking strategies by occluding the center regions of the images to address cases where foreground and background are difficult. For example, the DTD dataset that focuses on texture rather specific objects.