# CroMo-Mixup: Augmenting Cross-Model Representations for Continual Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [Lifelong Learning with Dynamically Expandable Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01547/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)
- [Gradient Projection Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09762/) (2021)
- [Whitening for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06346/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Models are Continual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04215/) (2021)
- [Scalable and Order-robust Continual Learning with Additive Parameter Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09432/) (2019)
- [A continual learning survey: Defying forgetting in classification tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08383/) (2019)
- [Representational Continuity for Unsupervised Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06976/) (2021)
- [A Theoretical Study on Solving Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02633/) (2022)
- [MixCo: Mix-up Contrastive Learning for Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06300/) (2020)

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

- [SAMix: Calibrated and Accurate Continual Learning via Sphere-Adaptive Mixup and Neural Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15751/) (2025)
- [Privacy-Aware Continual Self-Supervised Learning on Multi-Window Chest Computed Tomography for Domain-Shift Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27213/) (2025)
- [TAIL: Text-Audio Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04258/) (2025)
- [Lifelong Representations: A Survey on Continual Self-Supervised Learning for Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09785/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continual self-supervised learning (CSSL) learns a series of tasks sequentially on the unlabeled data. Two main challenges of continual learning are catastrophic forgetting and task confusion. While CSSL problem has been studied to address the catastrophic forgetting challenge, little work has been done to address the task confusion aspect. In this work, we show through extensive experiments that self-supervised learning (SSL) can make CSSL more susceptible to the task confusion problem, particularly in less diverse settings of class incremental learning because different classes belonging to different tasks are not trained concurrently. Motivated by this challenge, we present a novel cross-model feature Mixup (CroMo-Mixup) framework that addresses this issue through two key components: 1) Cross-Task data Mixup, which mixes samples across tasks to enhance negative sample diversity; and 2) Cross-Model feature Mixup, which learns similarities between embeddings obtained from current and old models of the mixed sample and the original images, facilitating cross-task class contrast learning and old knowledge retrieval. We evaluate the effectiveness of CroMo-Mixup to improve both Task-ID prediction and average linear accuracy across all tasks on three datasets, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and tinyImageNet under different class-incremental learning settings. We validate the compatibility of CroMo-Mixup on four state-of-the-art SSL objectives. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/ErumMushtaq/CroMo-Mixup.