# Dataset-Level Regularization for Joint-Embedding Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20158/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14791/) (2021)
- [Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09348/) (2021)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13625/) (2019)
- [LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08544/) (2025)
- [RankMe: Assessing the downstream performance of pretrained self-supervised representations by their rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02885/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06848/) (2021)
- [Cross-Batch Memory for Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06798/) (2019)
- [Scaling Deep Contrastive Learning Batch Size under Memory Limited Setup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06983/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised joint embedding learning aligns representations of augmented views while regularizing their distribution to prevent collapse. Regularization aims to shape the overall representation distribution, but most joint embedding methods restrict its computation to the active minibatch. We propose out-of-batch regularization, which maintains a dataset-level state in CPU memory and uses globally constructed per-instance targets during minibatch training. Evaluated on natural images and biomedical datasets, these anchors approximate the full-dataset regularization gradient more faithfully than conventional minibatch estimation at small batch sizes. Applications to contrastive (SimCLR) and non-contrastive (SIGReg) approaches show consistent improvement over the corresponding in-batch objectives for image classification, minority-class performance under controlled imbalance, instance retrieval, and continued self-supervised pretraining, with the largest gains at small batch sizes. These results suggest that dataset-level regularization can be decoupled from minibatch optimization, making batch size an optimization choice that does not affect the geometry of the regularizer.