English

Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty

Machine Learning 2019-10-30 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

Self-supervision provides effective representations for downstream tasks without requiring labels. However, existing approaches lag behind fully supervised training and are often not thought beneficial beyond obviating or reducing the need for annotations. We find that self-supervision can benefit robustness in a variety of ways, including robustness to adversarial examples, label corruption, and common input corruptions. Additionally, self-supervision greatly benefits out-of-distribution detection on difficult, near-distribution outliers, so much so that it exceeds the performance of fully supervised methods. These results demonstrate the promise of self-supervision for improving robustness and uncertainty estimation and establish these tasks as new axes of evaluation for future self-supervised learning research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.12340,
  title  = {Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty},
  author = {Dan Hendrycks and Mantas Mazeika and Saurav Kadavath and Dawn Song},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.12340},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2019; code and data available at https://github.com/hendrycks/ss-ood

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:07:03.971Z