Self-supervised learning solves pretext prediction tasks that do not require annotations to learn feature representations. For vision tasks, pretext tasks such as predicting rotation, solving jigsaw are solely created from the input data. Yet, predicting this known information helps in learning representations useful for downstream tasks. However, recent works have shown that wider and deeper models benefit more from self-supervised learning than smaller models. To address the issue of self-supervised pre-training of smaller models, we propose Distill-on-the-Go (DoGo), a self-supervised learning paradigm using single-stage online knowledge distillation to improve the representation quality of the smaller models. We employ deep mutual learning strategy in which two models collaboratively learn from each other to improve one another. Specifically, each model is trained using self-supervised learning along with distillation that aligns each model's softmax probabilities of similarity scores with that of the peer model. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, learning objectives, and architectures to demonstrate the potential of our proposed method. Our results show significant performance gain in the presence of noisy and limited labels and generalization to out-of-distribution data.

本文提出了一种基于单阶段在线知识蒸馏的自我监督学习法Distill-on-the-Go (DoGo)，采用深度互联策略，通过对齐两个模型的相似度得分的softmax概率来提供更好的表征质量，实验结果表明，该方法在存在噪声和有限标签以及区分数据方面具有显著性能提升和泛化能力

自我监督学习中在线知识蒸馏