A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning

Randall Balestriero, Mark Ibrahim, Vlad Sobal, Ari S. Morcos, Shashank Shekhar, Tom Goldstein, Florian Bordes, Adrien Bardes, Grégoire Mialon, Yuandong Tian, Avi Schwarzschild, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Jonas Geiping, Quentin Garrido, Pierre Fernandez, Amir Bar, Hamed Pirsiavash, Yann LeCun, Micah Goldblum

Abstract: Self-supervised learning, dubbed the dark matter of intelligence, is a promising path to advance machine learning. Yet, much like cooking, training SSL methods is a delicate art with a high barrier to entry. While many components are familiar, successfully training a SSL method involves a dizzying set of choices from the pretext tasks to training hyper-parameters. Our goal is to lower the barrier to entry into SSL research by laying the foundations and latest SSL recipes in the style of a cookbook. We hope to empower the curious researcher to navigate the terrain of methods, understand the role of the various knobs, and gain the know-how required to explore how delicious SSL can be.