# Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning at the Edge: An Energy Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08374/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Green AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10597/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [An Energy and GPU-Computation Efficient Backbone Network for Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09730/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10083/) (2022)
- [Toward Understanding the Feature Learning Process of Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15134/) (2021)
- [Towards the Generalization of Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00743/) (2021)
- [Understanding Collapse in Non-Contrastive Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15007/) (2022)
- [What Makes Good Contrastive Learning on Small-Scale Wearable-based Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05998/) (2022)
- [Federated Contrastive Learning for Decentralized Unlabeled Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07504/) (2021)
- [Relaxed Contrastive Learning for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04928/) (2024)
- [Data-Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining: Prioritizing Data Quality over Quantity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12267/) (2024)
- [The Cost of Training Machine Learning Models over Distributed Data Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07124/) (2022)
- [On the Efficacy of Small Self-Supervised Contrastive Models without Distillation Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14762/) (2021)
- [Measuring the Energy Consumption and Efficiency of Deep Neural Networks: An Empirical Analysis and Design Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08151/) (2024)
- [Dissecting FLOPs along input dimensions for GreenAI cost estimations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11949/) (2021)
- [ScatSimCLR: self-supervised contrastive learning with pretext task regularization for small-scale datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13939/) (2021)
- [Quantifying the Variability Collapse of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03440/) (2023)
- [Making EfficientNet More Efficient: Exploring Batch-Independent Normalization, Group Convolutions and Reduced Resolution Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03640/) (2021)
- [Establishing a stronger baseline for lightweight contrastive models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07158/) (2022)
- [On Improving the Algorithm-, Model-, and Data- Efficiency of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19289/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While contrastive learning (CL) shows considerable promise in self-supervised representation learning, its deployment on resource-constrained devices remains largely underexplored. The substantial computational demands required for training conventional CL frameworks pose a set of challenges, particularly in terms of energy consumption, data availability, and memory usage. We conduct an evaluation of four widely used CL frameworks: SimCLR, MoCo, SimSiam, and Barlow Twins. We focus on the practical feasibility of these CL frameworks for edge and fog deployment, and introduce a systematic benchmarking strategy that includes energy profiling and reduced training data conditions. Our findings reveal that SimCLR, contrary to its perceived computational cost, demonstrates the lowest energy consumption across various data regimes. Finally, we also extend our analysis by evaluating lightweight neural architectures when paired with CL frameworks. Our study aims to provide insights into the resource implications of deploying CL in edge/fog environments with limited processing capabilities and opens several research directions for its future optimization.