# On the Effectiveness of Supervision in Asymmetric Non-Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (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)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Prevalence of Neural Collapse during the terminal phase of deep learning training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08186/) (2020)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [CNN Features off-the-shelf: an Astounding Baseline for Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6382/) (2014)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning for Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01403/) (2020)
- [Understanding self-supervised Learning Dynamics without Contrastive Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06810/) (2021)
- [Co2L: Contrastive Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14413/) (2021)
- [Improving Transferability of Representations via Augmentation-Aware Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09613/) (2021)
- [Perfectly Balanced: Improving Transfer and Robustness of Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07596/) (2022)
- [Towards a Unified Theoretical Understanding of Non-contrastive Learning via Rank Differential Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02387/) (2023)

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

- [Modeling Hierarchical Spaces: A Review and Unified Framework for Surrogate-Based Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22621/) (2025)
- [A Theoretical Framework for Preventing Class Collapse in Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08203/) (2025)
- [Soft Task-Aware Routing of Experts for Equivariant Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27222/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised contrastive representation learning has been shown to be effective in various transfer learning scenarios. However, while asymmetric non-contrastive learning (ANCL) often outperforms its contrastive learning counterpart in self-supervised representation learning, the extension of ANCL to supervised scenarios is less explored. To bridge the gap, we study ANCL for supervised representation learning, coined SupSiam and SupBYOL, leveraging labels in ANCL to achieve better representations. The proposed supervised ANCL framework improves representation learning while avoiding collapse. Our analysis reveals that providing supervision to ANCL reduces intra-class variance, and the contribution of supervision should be adjusted to achieve the best performance. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of supervised ANCL across various datasets and tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/JH-Oh-23/Sup-ANCL.