ViewMix: Augmentation for Robust Representation in Self-Supervised Learning

Joint Embedding Architecture-based self-supervised learning methods have attributed the composition of data augmentations as a crucial factor for their strong representation learning capabilities. While regional dropout strategies have proven to guide models to focus on lesser indicative parts of the objects in supervised methods, it hasn’t been adopted by self-supervised methods for generating positive pairs. This is because the regional dropout methods are not suitable for the input sampling process of the self-supervised methodology. Whereas dropping informative pixels from the positive pairs can result in inefficient training, replacing patches of a specific object with a different one can steer the model from maximizing the agreement between different positive pairs. Moreover, joint embedding representation learning methods have not made robustness their primary training outcome. To this end, we propose the ViewMix augmentation policy, specially designed for self-supervised learning, upon generating different views of the same image, patches are cut and pasted from one view to another. By leveraging the different views created by this augmentation strategy, multiple joint embedding-based self-supervised methodologies obtained better localization capability and consistently outperformed their corresponding baseline methods. Applying ViewMix yielded performance improvements of 1.20%, 1.74% and 2.34% over baseline methods on the CIFAR-10 linear evaluation when employed with SimCLR, VICReg, and VIbCReg, respectively. Further expansion of the evaluation to VICRegL reveals that ViewMix with VICReg has a performance increase of 3.24% compared to VICRegL. It is also demonstrated that incorporating ViewMix augmentation policy promotes robustness of the representations in the state-of-the-art methods. Employing ViewMix results in up to a 6.63% increase in accuracy, underscoring the method’s robustness in enhancing image representation. Furthermore, our experimentation and analysis of compute times suggest that ViewMix augmentation doesn’t introduce any additional overhead compared to other counterparts.