Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

BYOL works even without batch statistics

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2010.10241 v1 pith:2H4ZBUAV submitted 2020-10-20 stat.ML cs.CVcs.LG

BYOL works even without batch statistics

classification stat.ML cs.CVcs.LG
keywords byolbatchimagenegativenormalizationrepresentationaugmentedcollapse
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) is a self-supervised learning approach for image representation. From an augmented view of an image, BYOL trains an online network to predict a target network representation of a different augmented view of the same image. Unlike contrastive methods, BYOL does not explicitly use a repulsion term built from negative pairs in its training objective. Yet, it avoids collapse to a trivial, constant representation. Thus, it has recently been hypothesized that batch normalization (BN) is critical to prevent collapse in BYOL. Indeed, BN flows gradients across batch elements, and could leak information about negative views in the batch, which could act as an implicit negative (contrastive) term. However, we experimentally show that replacing BN with a batch-independent normalization scheme (namely, a combination of group normalization and weight standardization) achieves performance comparable to vanilla BYOL ($73.9\%$ vs. $74.3\%$ top-1 accuracy under the linear evaluation protocol on ImageNet with ResNet-$50$). Our finding disproves the hypothesis that the use of batch statistics is a crucial ingredient for BYOL to learn useful representations.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers

    cs.CV 2021-04 conditional novelty 8.0

    Self-supervised ViTs show emergent semantic segmentation and 78.3% k-NN accuracy on ImageNet; DINO reaches 80.1% linear evaluation with ViT-Base.

  2. Embracing Biased Transition Matrices for Complementary-Label Learning with Many Classes

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    BICL uses biased non-uniform transition matrices to generate constrained complementary labels, enabling effective learning and over sevenfold accuracy gains on many-class image datasets.

  3. VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning

    cs.CV 2021-05 accept novelty 7.0

    VICReg prevents collapse in self-supervised image embeddings via explicit variance, invariance, and covariance regularization and matches state-of-the-art downstream performance.

  4. Group-Equivariant Poincar\'e Convolutional Networks

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Equivariant Poincaré ResNets combine hyperbolic geometry with C4 and D4 group symmetries via specialized reshaping, permutations, and batch norm to reduce optimization space and speed convergence while staying inside ...

  5. The Geometry of Projection Heads: Conditioning, Invariance, and Collapse

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Projection heads act as geometric buffers; nonlinear heads induce negative Hessian curvature to escape dimensional collapse while linear heads rely on discrete dynamics and BatchNorm.

  6. Vision Transformers Need Registers

    cs.CV 2023-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Adding register tokens to Vision Transformers eliminates high-norm background artifacts and raises state-of-the-art performance on dense visual prediction tasks.