A Survey of Self-supervised Learning from Multiple Perspectives: Algorithms, Applications and Future Trends

Deep supervised learning algorithms generally require large numbers of labeled examples to achieve satisfactory performance. However, collecting and labeling too many examples can be costly and time-consuming. As a subset of unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to learn useful features from unlabeled examples without any human-annotated labels. SSL has recently attracted much attention and many related algorithms have been developed. However, there are few comprehensive studies that explain the connections and evolution of different SSL variants. In this paper, we provide a review of various SSL methods from the perspectives of algorithms, applications, three main trends, and open questions. First, the motivations of most SSL algorithms are introduced in detail, and their commonalities and differences are compared. Second, typical applications of SSL in domains such as image processing and computer vision (CV), as well as natural language processing (NLP), are discussed. Finally, the three main trends of SSL and the open research questions are discussed. A collection of useful materials is available at https://github.com/guijiejie/SSL.