Occam's Razor for Self Supervised Learning: What is Sufficient to Learn Good Representations?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ibrahim, Mark, Klindt, David, Balestriero, Randall
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Ibrahim, Mark
Klindt, David
Balestriero, Randall
author_facet Ibrahim, Mark
Klindt, David
Balestriero, Randall
contents Deep Learning is often depicted as a trio of data-architecture-loss. Yet, recent Self Supervised Learning (SSL) solutions have introduced numerous additional design choices, e.g., a projector network, positive views, or teacher-student networks. These additions pose two challenges. First, they limit the impact of theoretical studies that often fail to incorporate all those intertwined designs. Second, they slow-down the deployment of SSL methods to new domains as numerous hyper-parameters need to be carefully tuned. In this study, we bring forward the surprising observation that--at least for pretraining datasets of up to a few hundred thousands samples--the additional designs introduced by SSL do not contribute to the quality of the learned representations. That finding not only provides legitimacy to existing theoretical studies, but also simplifies the practitioner's path to SSL deployment in numerous small and medium scale settings. Our finding answers a long-lasting question: the often-experienced sensitivity to training settings and hyper-parameters encountered in SSL come from their design, rather than the absence of supervised guidance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_10743
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Occam's Razor for Self Supervised Learning: What is Sufficient to Learn Good Representations?
Ibrahim, Mark
Klindt, David
Balestriero, Randall
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Deep Learning is often depicted as a trio of data-architecture-loss. Yet, recent Self Supervised Learning (SSL) solutions have introduced numerous additional design choices, e.g., a projector network, positive views, or teacher-student networks. These additions pose two challenges. First, they limit the impact of theoretical studies that often fail to incorporate all those intertwined designs. Second, they slow-down the deployment of SSL methods to new domains as numerous hyper-parameters need to be carefully tuned. In this study, we bring forward the surprising observation that--at least for pretraining datasets of up to a few hundred thousands samples--the additional designs introduced by SSL do not contribute to the quality of the learned representations. That finding not only provides legitimacy to existing theoretical studies, but also simplifies the practitioner's path to SSL deployment in numerous small and medium scale settings. Our finding answers a long-lasting question: the often-experienced sensitivity to training settings and hyper-parameters encountered in SSL come from their design, rather than the absence of supervised guidance.
title Occam's Razor for Self Supervised Learning: What is Sufficient to Learn Good Representations?
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10743