Self-Supervised Pyramid Representation Learning for Multi-Label Visual Analysis and Beyond

Cheng-Yen Hsieh, Chih-Jung Chang, Fu-En Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 2696-2705

While self-supervised learning has been shown to benefit a number of vision tasks, existing techniques mainly focus on image-level manipulation, which may not generalize well to downstream tasks at patch or pixel levels. Moreover, existing SSL methods might not sufficiently describe and associate the above representations within and across image scales. In this paper, we propose a Self-Supervised Pyramid Representation Learning (SS-PRL) framework. The proposed SS-PRL is designed to derive pyramid representations at patch levels via learning proper prototypes, with additional learners to observe and relate inherent semantic information within an image. In particular, we present a cross-scale patch-level correlation learning in SS-PRL, which allows the model to aggregate and associate information learned across patch scales. We show that, with our proposed SS-PRL for model pre-training, one can easily adapt and fine-tune the models for a variety of applications including multi-label classification, object detection, and instance segmentation.