Frequency-Guided Masking for Enhanced Vision Self-Supervised Learning

Amin Karimi Monsefi, Mengxi Zhou, Nastaran Karimi Monsefi, Ser-Nam Lim, Wei-Lun Chao, Rajiv Ramnath

Keywords: Self-supervised learning, Frequency domain analysis, Knowledge distillation, Vision Self-Supervised Learning, Pre-training

TL;DR: We introduce FOLK, a novel SSL method that adaptively masks image frequencies and uses knowledge distillation, enhancing pre-training and reducing downstream data needs.

Abstract: We present a novel frequency-based Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approach that significantly enhances its efficacy for pre-training. Prior work in this direction masks out pre-defined frequencies in the input image and employs a reconstruction loss to pre-train the model. While achieving promising results, such an implementation has two fundamental limitations as identified in our paper. First, using pre-defined frequencies overlooks the variability of image frequency responses. Second, pre-trained with frequency-filtered images, the resulting model needs relatively more data to adapt to naturally looking images during fine-tuning. To address these drawbacks, we propose FOurier transform compression with seLf-Knowledge distillation (FOLK), integrating two dedicated ideas. First, inspired by image compression, we adaptively select the masked-out frequencies based on image frequency responses, creating more suitable SSL tasks for pre-training. Second, we employ a two-branch framework empowered by knowledge distillation, enabling the model to take both the filtered and original images as input, largely reducing the burden of downstream tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FOLK in achieving competitive performance to many state-of-the-art SSL methods across various downstream tasks, including image classification, few-shot learning, and semantic segmentation.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 7960