Pixel-global Self-supervised Learning with Uncertainty-aware Context Stabilizer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning method that captures global and pixel-level consistencies between augmented images, using an uncertainty-aware stabilizer to adaptively preserve context and improve dense predictive tasks.

Contribution

The novel approach combines global and pixel-level consistency enforcement with an uncertainty-aware stabilizer using Monte Carlo dropout, enhancing SSL performance.

Findings

Effective in capturing global and local consistencies

Adaptive stabilization improves representation quality

Outperforms existing SSL methods on downstream tasks

Abstract

We developed a novel SSL approach to capture global consistency and pixel-level local consistencies between differently augmented views of the same images to accommodate downstream discriminative and dense predictive tasks. We adopted the teacher-student architecture used in previous contrastive SSL methods. In our method, the global consistency is enforced by aggregating the compressed representations of augmented views of the same image. The pixel-level consistency is enforced by pursuing similar representations for the same pixel in differently augmented views. Importantly, we introduced an uncertainty-aware context stabilizer to adaptively preserve the context gap created by the two views from different augmentations. Moreover, we used Monte Carlo dropout in the stabilizer to measure uncertainty and adaptively balance the discrepancy between the representations of the same pixels in different views.