Paper
Publication
Bootstrap Your Own Latent: A new approach to self-supervised learning
Abstract

We introduce Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL), a new approach to self-supervised image representation learning. BYOL relies on two neural networks, referred to as online and target networks, that interact and learn from each other. In particular, from a transformation of an image, we train the online network to predict the target network representation of the same image under a different transformation. At the same time, we update the target network with a slowly-moving average of the online network. While state-of-the art methods intrinsically rely on negative pairs, BYOL achieves a new state of the art without them. BYOL reaches 74.5% top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet using the standard linear evaluation protocol with a standard ResNet-50 architecture and 79.5% with a larger ResNet. We also show that BYOL performs on par or better than the current state of the art on both transfer and semi-supervised benchmarks.