Mean Shift for Self-Supervised Learning

Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani, Ajinkya Tejankar, Hamed Pirsiavash; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 10326-10335

Most recent self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms learn features by contrasting between instances of images or by clustering the images and then contrasting between the image clusters. We introduce a simple mean-shift algorithm that learns representations by grouping images together without contrasting between them or adopting much of prior on the structure or number of the clusters. We simply "shift" the embedding of each image to be close to the "mean" of the neighbors of its augmentation. Since the closest neighbor is always another augmentation of the same image, our model will be identical to BYOL when using only one nearest neighbor instead of 5 used in our experiments. Our model achieves 72.4% on ImageNet linear evaluation with ResNet50 at 200 epochs outperforming BYOL. Also, our method outperforms the SOTA by a large margin when using weak augmentations only, facilitating the adoption of SSL for other modalities. Our code is available here: https://github.com/UMBCvision/MSF