Meta Research

Convolutional neural networks provide visual features that perform well in many computer vision applications. However, training these networks requires large amounts of supervision; this paper introduces a generic framework to train such networks, end-to-end, with no supervision. We propose to fix a set of target representations, called Noise As Targets (NAT), and to constrain the deep features to align to them. This domain agnostic approach avoids the standard unsupervised learning issues of trivial solutions and collapsing of features. Thanks to a stochastic batch reassignment strategy and a separable square loss function, it scales to millions of images. The proposed approach produces representations that perform on par with state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on ImageNet and PASCAL VOC.