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Dataset distillation (DD) generates small synthetic datasets that can efficiently train deep networks with a limited amount of memory and compute. Despite the success of DD methods for supervised learning, DD for self-supervised pre-training of deep models has remained unaddressed. Pre-training on unlabeled data is crucial for efficiently generalizing to downstream tasks with limited labeled data. In this work, we propose the first effective DD method for SSL pre-training. First, we show, theoretically and empirically, that naive application of supervised DD methods to SSL fails, due to the high variance of the SSL gradient. Then, we address this issue by relying on insights from knowledge distillation (KD) literature. Specifically, we train a small student model to match the representations of a larger teacher model trained with SSL. Then, we generate a small synthetic dataset by matching the training trajectories of the student models. As the KD objective has considerably lower variance than SSL, our approach can generate synthetic datasets that can successfully pre-train high-quality encoders. Through extensive experiments, we show that our distilled sets lead to up to 13% higher accuracy than prior work, on a variety of downstream tasks, in the presence of limited labeled data.

An effective technique for obtaining high-quality representations is adding a projection head on top of the encoder during training, then discarding it and using the pre-projection representations. Despite its proven practical effectiveness, the reason behind the success of this technique is poorly understood. The pre-projection representations are not directly optimized by the loss function, raising the question: what makes them better? In this work, we provide a rigorous theoretical answer to this question. We start by examining linear models trained with self-supervised contrastive loss. We reveal that the implicit bias of training algorithms leads to layer-wise progressive feature weighting, where features become increasingly unequal as we go deeper into the layers. Consequently, lower layers tend to have more normalized and less specialized representations. We theoretically characterize scenarios where such representations are more beneficial, highlighting the intricate interplay between data augmentation and input features. Additionally, we demonstrate that introducing non-linearity into the network allows lower layers to learn features that are completely absent in higher layers. Finally, we show how this mechanism improves the robustness in supervised contrastive learning and supervised learning. We empirically validate our results through various experiments on CIFAR-10/100, UrbanCars and shifted versions of ImageNet. We also introduce a potential alternative to projection head, which offers a more interpretable and controllable design.

Since autonomous driving systems usually face dynamic and ever-changing environments, continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) has been proposed as a strategy for transferring deployed models to continually changing target domains. However, the pursuit of long-term adaptation often introduces catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation problems, which impede the practical implementation of CTTA in the real world. Recently, existing CTTA methods mainly focus on utilizing a majority of parameters to fit target domain knowledge through self-training. Unfortunately, these approaches often amplify the challenge of error accumulation due to noisy pseudo-labels, and pose practical limitations stemming from the heavy computational costs associated with entire model updates. In this paper, we propose a distribution-aware tuning (DAT) method to make the semantic segmentation CTTA efficient and practical in real-world applications. DAT adaptively selects and updates two small groups of trainable parameters based on data distribution during the continual adaptation process, including domain-specific parameters (DSP) and task-relevant parameters (TRP). Specifically, DSP exhibits sensitivity to outputs with substantial distribution shifts, effectively mitigating the problem of error accumulation. In contrast, TRP are allocated to positions that are responsive to outputs with minor distribution shifts, which are fine-tuned to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem. In addition, since CTTA is a temporal task, we introduce the Parameter Accumulation Update (PAU) strategy to collect the updated DSP and TRP in target domain sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on two widely-used semantic segmentation CTTA benchmarks, achieving promising performance compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

A sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization can send out a swarm of self-replicating probes for space exploration. Given the fast-growing number of such a probe, even if there is only one extraterrestrial civilization sending out such probes in the Milky Way galaxy, we should still expect to see them. The fact that we do not consists part of the Fermi paradox. The suggestion that self-replicating probes will eventually mutate to consume their progenitors and therefore significantly reduce the number of total probes has been investigated and dismissed in the literature. In this work, we re-visit this question with a more realistic Lotka-Volterra model, and show that mutated probes would drive the progenitor probes into "extinction", thereby replacing them to spread throughout the galaxy. Thus, the efficiency of mutated probes in reducing the total number of self-replicating probes is even less than previously thought. As part of the analysis, we also suggest that, somewhat counter-intuitively, in designing self-replicating probes, one should not program them to stop replicating when sufficient mutation causes the probes to fail to recognize the progenitor probes as "self"., Comment: Revised version to appear in EPJ Plus