# Contrastive Learning for Image Complexity Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Convolutions Die Hard: Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Single Frozen Convolutional CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02487/) (2023)
- [Effective Fusion Factor in FPN for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02298/) (2020)

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

- [Medical Imaging Complexity and its Effects on GAN Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17959/) (2024)
- [Anatomy-Aware Lymphoma Lesion Detection in Whole-Body PET/CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07047/) (2025)
- [Distilling Formal Logic into Neural Spaces: A Kernel Alignment Approach for Signal Temporal Logic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05198/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quantifying and evaluating image complexity can be instrumental in enhancing the performance of various computer vision tasks. Supervised learning can effectively learn image complexity features from well-annotated datasets. However, creating such datasets requires expensive manual annotation costs. The models may learn human subjective biases from it. In this work, we introduce the MoCo v2 framework. We utilize contrastive learning to represent image complexity, named CLIC (Contrastive Learning for Image Complexity). We find that there are complexity differences between different local regions of an image, and propose Random Crop and Mix (RCM), which can produce positive samples consisting of multi-scale local crops. RCM can also expand the train set and increase data diversity without introducing additional data. We conduct extensive experiments with CLIC, comparing it with both unsupervised and supervised methods. The results demonstrate that the performance of CLIC is comparable to that of state-of-the-art supervised methods. In addition, we establish the pipelines that can apply CLIC to computer vision tasks to effectively improve their performance.