Facebook & Inria Propose High-Performance Self-Supervised Technique for CV Tasks

Researchers from Facebook and the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) have developed a new technique for self-supervised training of convolutional networks used for image classification and other computer vision tasks. The proposed method surpasses supervised techniques on most transfer tasks and outperforms previous self-supervised approaches. "Our approach allows researchers to train efficient, high-performance image classification models with no annotations or metadata," the researchers write in a Facebook blog post. "More broadly, we believe that self-supervised learning is key to building more flexible and useful AI." Recent improvements in self-supervised training methods have established them as a serious alternative to traditional supervised training. Self-supervised approaches however are significantly slower to train compared to their supervised counterparts.