Evaluating the effects of data augmentations for specific latent features : Using self-supervised learning

Abstract: Supervised learning requires labeled data which is cumbersome to produce, making it costly and time-consuming. SimCLR is a self-supervising framework that uses data augmentations to learn without labels. This thesis investigates how well cropping and color distorting augmentations work for two datasets, MPI3D and Causal3DIdent. The representations learned are evaluated using representation similarity analysis. The data augmentations were meant to make the model learn invariant representations of the object shape in the images regarding it as content while ignoring unnecessary features and regarding them as style. As a result, 8 models were created, models A-H. A and E were trained using supervised learning as a benchmark for the remaining self-supervised models. B and C learned invariant features of style instead of learning invariant representations of shape. Model D learned invariant representations of shape. Although, it also regarded style-related factors as content. Model F, G, and H managed to learn invariant representations of shape with varying intensities while regarding the rest of the features as style. The conclusion was that models can learn invariant representations of features related to content using self-supervised learning with the chosen augmentations. However, the augmentation settings must be suitable for the dataset.