# Views Can Be Deceiving: Improved SSL Through Feature Space Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [Confounding variables can degrade generalization performance of radiological deep learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00431/) (2018)
- [Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08010/) (2018)
- [The Pitfalls of Simplicity Bias in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07710/) (2020)
- [Provable Guarantees for Self-Supervised Deep Learning with Spectral Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04156/) (2021)
- [An Investigation of Why Overparameterization Exacerbates Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04345/) (2020)
- [Environment Inference for Invariant Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07249/) (2020)
- [Fairness without Demographics through Adversarially Reweighted Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13114/) (2020)
- [Surgical Fine-Tuning Improves Adaptation to Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11466/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning Without Augmenting: Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning via Frame Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22655/) (2025)
- [VINO: Video-driven Invariance for Non-contextual Objects via Structural Prior Guided De-contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07222/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised learning methods have been found to exhibit inductive biases favoring simpler features. When such features are spuriously correlated with the label, this can result in suboptimal performance on minority subgroups. Despite the growing popularity of methods which learn from unlabeled data, the extent to which these representations rely on spurious features for prediction is unclear. In this work, we explore the impact of spurious features on Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for visual representation learning. We first empirically show that commonly used augmentations in SSL can cause undesired invariances in the image space, and illustrate this with a simple example. We further show that classical approaches in combating spurious correlations, such as dataset re-sampling during SSL, do not consistently lead to invariant representations. Motivated by these findings, we propose LateTVG to remove spurious information from these representations during pre-training, by regularizing later layers of the encoder via pruning. We find that our method produces representations which outperform the baselines on several benchmarks, without the need for group or label information during SSL.