FroSSL: Frobenius Norm Minimization for Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is an increasingly popular paradigm for representation learning. Recent methods can be classified as sample-contrastive, dimension-contrastive, or asymmetric network-based, with each family having its own approach to avoiding informational collapse. While dimension-contrastive methods converge to similar solutions as sample-contrastive methods, it can be empirically shown that some methods require more epochs of training to converge. Motivated by closing this divide, we present the objective function FroSSL which is both sample- and dimension-contrastive up to embedding normalization. FroSSL works by minimizing covariance Frobenius norms for avoiding collapse and minimizing mean-squared error for augmentation invariance. We show that FroSSL converges more quickly than a variety of other SSL methods and provide theoretical and empirical support that this faster convergence is due to how FroSSL affects the eigenvalues of the embedding covariance matrices. We also show that FroSSL learns competitive representations on linear probe evaluation when used to train a ResNet18 on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, and ImageNet datasets.