# MoSiC: Optimal-Transport Motion Trajectory for Dense Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08694 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08694/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03327/) (2018)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap to Real-World Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14860/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles: Synergistic Representation Learning for Unsupervised Video Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03390/) (2026)
- [TrackMAE: Video Representation Learning via Track Mask and Predict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27268/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Foundation Models' 3D Understanding Through Multi-View Correspondence Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11574/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Structured Dynamics from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21576/) (2026)
- [I Have a Stream: Making Self-Supervised Learning Work on Continuous Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40333/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dense self-supervised learning has shown great promise for learning pixel- and patch-level representations, but extending it to videos remains challenging due to the complexity of motion dynamics. Existing approaches struggle as they rely on static augmentations that fail under object deformations, occlusions, and camera movement, leading to inconsistent feature learning over time. We propose a motion-guided self-supervised learning framework that clusters dense point tracks to learn spatiotemporally consistent representations. By leveraging an off-the-shelf point tracker, we extract long-range motion trajectories and optimize feature clustering through a momentum-encoder-based optimal transport mechanism. To ensure temporal coherence, we propagate cluster assignments along tracked points, enforcing feature consistency across views despite viewpoint changes. Integrating motion as an implicit supervisory signal, our method learns representations that generalize across frames, improving robustness in dynamic scenes and challenging occlusion scenarios. By initializing from strong image-pretrained models and leveraging video data for training, we improve state-of-the-art by 1% to 6% on six image and video datasets and four evaluation benchmarks. The implementation is publicly available at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/SMSD75/MoSiC/tree/main