Enhancing self-supervised visual representation learning through adversarially generated examples

Abstract Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for leveraging unlabeled data to learn rich feature representations. However, the efficacy of self-supervised models is often limited by the degree and complexity of the augmentations used during training. In this work, we propose a novel framework that enhances self-supervised learning by incorporating a generative network designed to produce adversarial examples that challenge the learning process. By integrating adversarially generated data, our method extends three well-known self-supervised architectures---SimCLR, BYOL, and SimSiam---and improves their generalization and robustness. We evaluate our approach on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements in classification accuracy over baseline models. Notably, our proposed method outperforms standard self-supervised learning techniques, achieving significant gains in top-1 accuracy across all datasets and training epochs. This substantiates our hypothesis that adversarial examples can significantly contribute to the feature learning capabilities of self-supervised models. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the integration of generative networks can serve as a catalyst for the development of more advanced self-supervised learning algorithms. This study lays the groundwork for future research exploring the potential of adversarial training in self-supervised learning and its applications across diverse domains.