ssl

Figure 1: stepwise behavior in self-supervised learning. When training common SSL algorithms, we find that the loss descends in a stepwise fashion (top left) and the learned embeddings iteratively increase in dimensionality (bottom left). Direct visualization of embeddings (right; top three PCA directions shown) confirms that embeddings are initially collapsed to a point, which then expands to a 1D manifold, a 2D manifold, and beyond concurrently with steps in the loss. It is widely believed that deep learning’s stunning success is due in part to its ability to discover and extract useful representations of complex data. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has…