Local-Global Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

Self-supervised representation learning methods mainly focus on image-level instance discrimination. This study explores the potential benefits of incorporating patch-level discrimination into existing methods to enhance the quality of learned representations by simultaneously looking at local and global visual features. Towards this idea, we present a straightforward yet effective patch-matching algorithm that can find the corresponding patches across the augmented views of an image. The augmented views are subsequently fed into a self-supervised learning framework employing Vision Transformer (ViT) as its backbone. The result is the generation of both image-level and patch-level representations. Leveraging the proposed patch-matching algorithm, the model minimizes the representation distance between not only the CLS tokens but also the corresponding patches. As a result, the model gains a more comprehensive understanding of both the entirety of the image as well as its finer details. We pretrain the proposed method on small, medium, and large-scale datasets. It is shown that our approach could outperform state-of-the-art image-level representation learning methods on both image classification and downstream tasks. Keywords: Self-Supervised Learning; Visual Representations; Local-Global Representation Learning; Patch-Wise Representation Learning; Vision Transformer (ViT)