# CycleCL: Self-supervised Learning for Periodic Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03800/) (2020)
- [CNN Features off-the-shelf: an Astounding Baseline for Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6382/) (2014)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [Data Augmentation Can Improve Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05328/) (2021)
- [PANDA: Adapting Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05903/) (2020)
- [Temporal Cycle-Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07846/) (2019)
- [Divide and Contrast: Self-supervised Learning from Uncurated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08054/) (2021)
- [Video Representation Learning by Recognizing Temporal Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10730/) (2020)
- [Counting Out Time: Class Agnostic Video Repetition Counting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15418/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01514/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Every Shot Counts: Using Exemplars for Repetition Counting in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18074/) (2024)
- [DD-rPPGNet: De-interfering and Descriptive Feature Learning for Unsupervised rPPG Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21402/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Long-Term Spatiotemporal Periodic Workflows in Human Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14945/) (2025)
- [TReViS: Temporal Repetition Structure Aware Video Synthesis for Self-supervised Repetitive Action Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24367/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Analyzing periodic video sequences is a key topic in applications such as automatic production systems, remote sensing, medical applications, or physical training. An example is counting repetitions of a physical exercise. Due to the distinct characteristics of periodic data, self-supervised methods designed for standard image datasets do not capture changes relevant to the progression of the cycle and fail to ignore unrelated noise. They thus do not work well on periodic data. In this paper, we propose CycleCL, a self-supervised learning method specifically designed to work with periodic data. We start from the insight that a good visual representation for periodic data should be sensitive to the phase of a cycle, but be invariant to the exact repetition, i.e. it should generate identical representations for a specific phase throughout all repetitions. We exploit the repetitions in videos to design a novel contrastive learning method based on a triplet loss that optimizes for these desired properties. Our method uses pre-trained features to sample pairs of frames from approximately the same phase and negative pairs of frames from different phases. Then, we iterate between optimizing a feature encoder and resampling triplets, until convergence. By optimizing a model this way, we are able to learn features that have the mentioned desired properties. We evaluate CycleCL on an industrial and multiple human actions datasets, where it significantly outperforms previous video-based self-supervised learning methods on all tasks.