Mask-supervised Object-centric Representation Learning with LeJEPA

Abstract

Self-supervised image encoders deliver strong features for downstream tasks but need many images for training. A natural remedy to counter this is to make each image count for more. A scene contains many objects, and given masks from human annotators or an off-the-shelf segmentation model, pre-training can focus on aligning per-object rather than image-wide representations, extracting more signal from every image. Existing mask-supervised methods do this through reconstruction or contrastive losses that leverage negative objects. We instead use two separate projection spaces for the alignment. In a \emph{semantic space}, per-object representations from different views are aligned. To avoid collapse, instead of using negative objects, which requires category definitions, we extend the negative-free LeJEPA objective and show that its distributional anti-collapse regularizer ports naturally from whole images to the variable-sized set of objects in a scene. In an \emph{instance space}, a contrastive loss separates per-object representations from their context and co-occurring instances, including those of the same category. To separate object representations from their context, we copy objects and paste them into other contexts, where each pasted copy serves as an additional view of the original object. Trained on COCO with ground-truth masks, our method outperforms image-level and mask-guided baselines on tracking (DAVIS), classification (ImageNet-1k) and re-identification (NAVI), matches the best of them on semantic segmentation (ADE20k) and keeps its lead over image-level LeJEPA and a supervision-matched alternative on COCO fractions down to 256 images.