PooDLe: Pooled and dense self-supervised learning from naturalistic videos

Self-supervised learning has driven significant progress in learning from single-subject, iconic images. However, there are still unanswered questions about the use of minimally-curated, naturalistic video data, which contain dense scenes with many independent objects, imbalanced class distributions, and varying object sizes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines an invariance-based SSL objective on pooled representations with a dense SSL objective that enforces equivariance to optical flow warping. Our findings indicate that a unified objective applied at multiple feature scales is essential for learning effective image representations from high-resolution, naturalistic videos. We validate our approach on the BDD100K driving video dataset and the Walking Tours first-person video dataset, demonstrating its ability to capture spatial understanding from a dense objective and semantic understanding via a pooled representation objective.