A Survey of the Self Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in computer vision tasks. However, their parameter-intensive nature and reliance on large amounts of data for effective performance have shifted the focus from traditional human-annotated labels to unsupervised learning and pretraining strategies that uncover hidden structures within the data. In response to this challenge, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm. SSL leverages inherent relationships within the data itself as a form of supervision, eliminating the need for manual labeling and offering a more scalable and resource-efficient alternative for model training. Given these advantages, it is imperative to explore the integration of SSL techniques with ViTs, particularly in scenarios with limited labeled data. Inspired by this evolving trend, this survey aims to systematically review SSL mechanisms tailored for ViTs. We propose a comprehensive taxonomy to classify SSL techniques based on their representations and pre-training tasks. Additionally, we discuss the motivations behind SSL, review prominent pre-training tasks, and highlight advancements and challenges in this field. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of various SSL methods designed for ViTs, evaluating their strengths, limitations, and applicability to different scenarios.