# Self-Soupervision: Cooking Model Soups without Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02890 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02890/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [TIES-Merging: Resolving Interference When Merging Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01708/) (2023)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Linear Mode Connectivity and the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05671/) (2019)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [Rotation Equivariant CNNs for Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03962/) (2018)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [Towards Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Wild World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12400/) (2023)
- [Are we done with ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07159/) (2020)
- [MultiMAE: Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01678/) (2022)
- [Personalized Soups: Personalized Large Language Model Alignment via Post-hoc Parameter Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11564/) (2023)
- [Rewarded soups: towards Pareto-optimal alignment by interpolating weights fine-tuned on diverse rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04488/) (2023)
- [Multi-task Self-Supervised Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07860/) (2017)
- [Diverse Weight Averaging for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09739/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Masked Swingers: Harnessing Data Augmentation to Advance Autoencoders for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38278/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model soups are strange and strangely effective combinations of parameters. They take a model (the stock), fine-tune it into multiple models (the ingredients), and then mix their parameters back into one model (the soup) to improve predictions. While all known soups require supervised learning, and optimize the same loss on labeled data, our recipes for Self-Soupervision generalize soups to self-supervised learning (SSL). Our Self-Souping lets us flavor ingredients on new data sources, e.g. from unlabeled data from a task for transfer or from a shift for robustness. We show that Self-Souping on corrupted test data, then fine-tuning back on uncorrupted train data, boosts robustness by +3.5% (ImageNet-C) and +7% (LAION-C). Self-Soupervision also unlocks countless SSL algorithms to cook the diverse ingredients needed for more robust soups. We show for the first time that ingredients can differ in their SSL hyperparameters -- and more surprisingly, in their SSL algorithms. We cook soups of MAE, MoCoV3, MMCR, and LeJEPA ingredients that are more accurate than any single SSL ingredient.
