Escaping The Big Data Paradigm in Self-Supervised Representation Learning

The reliance on large-scale datasets and extensive computational resources has become a major barrier to advancing representation learning in vision, especially in data-scarce domains. In this paper, we address the critical question: Can we escape the big data paradigm in self-supervised representation learning from images? We introduce SCOTT (Sparse Convolutional Tokenizer for Transformers), a shallow tokenization architecture that is compatible with Masked Image Modeling (MIM) tasks. SCOTT injects convolutional inductive biases into Vision Transformers (ViTs), enhancing their efficacy in small-scale data regimes. Alongside, we propose to train on a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture within a MIM framework (MIM-JEPA), operating in latent representation space to capture more semantic features. Our approach enables ViTs to be trained from scratch on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than traditionally required --without relying on massive external datasets for pretraining. We validate our method on three small-size, standard-resoultion, fine-grained datasets: Oxford Flowers-102, Oxford IIIT Pets-37, and ImageNet-100. Despite the challenges of limited data and high intra-class similarity, frozen SCOTT models pretrained with MIM-JEPA significantly outperform fully supervised methods and achieve competitive results with SOTA approaches that rely on large-scale pretraining, complex image augmentations and bigger model sizes. By demonstrating that robust off-the-shelf representations can be learned with limited data, compute, and model sizes, our work paves the way for computer applications in resource constrained environments such as medical imaging or robotics. Our findings challenge the prevailing notion that vast amounts of data are indispensable for effective representation learning in vision, offering a new pathway toward more accessible and inclusive advancements in the field.