Web-SSL: Scaling Visual Representation Learning Beyond Language Supervision

Web-SSL: Redefining Visual Representation Learning Without Language Supervision The Shift from Language-Dependent to Vision-Only Models In the realm of computer vision, language-supervised models like CLIP have long dominated multimodal research. However, the Web-SSL model family, developed through a collaboration between Meta and leading universities, achieves groundbreaking results using purely visual self-supervised learning (SSL). This research demonstrates that large-scale vision-only training can not only match traditional vision task performance but also surpass language-supervised models in text-rich scenarios like OCR and chart understanding. This article explores Web-SSL’s technical innovations and provides actionable implementation guidelines. Key Breakthroughs: Three Pillars of Visual SSL 1. …