Recent progress in self-supervision has shown that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to substantial increases in generalization to downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing.Variants have also been proposed for image data, but their applicability to remote sensing tasks is limited.To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose a benchmark comprised of six classification and six segmentation tasks, which were carefully curated and adapted to be both relevant to the field and well-suited for model evaluation. We accompany this benchmark with a robust methodology for evaluating models and reporting aggregated results to enable a reliable assessment of progress. Finally, we report results for 20 baselines to gain information about the performance of existing models.We believe that this benchmark will be a driver of progress across a variety of Earth monitoring tasks.

Labeling data is often expensive and time-consuming, especially for tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation, which require dense labeling of the image. While few-shot object detection is about training a model on novel (unseen) object classes with little data, it still requires prior training on many labeled examples of base (seen) classes. On the other hand, self-supervised methods aim at learning representations from unlabeled data which transfer well to downstream tasks such as object detection. Combining few-shot and self-supervised object detection is a promising research direction. In this survey, we review and characterize the most recent approaches on few-shot and self-supervised object detection. Then, we give our main takeaways and discuss future research directions. Project page: https://gabrielhuang.github.io/fsod-survey/.

Games generalize the single-objective optimization paradigm by introducing different objective functions for different players. Differentiable games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. In machine learning, games are gaining new importance through formulations like generative adversarial networks (GANs) and actor-critic systems. However, compared to single-objective optimization, game dynamics is more complex and less understood. In this paper, we analyze gradient-based methods with momentum on simple games. We prove that alternating updates are more stable than simultaneous updates. Next, we show both theoretically and empirically that alternating gradient updates with a negative momentum term achieves convergence in a difficult toy adversarial problem, but also on the notoriously difficult to train saturating GANs.

Scattering networks are a class of designed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with fixed weights. We argue they can serve as generic representations for modelling images. In particular, by working in scattering space, we achieve competitive results both for supervised and unsupervised learning tasks, while making progress towards constructing more interpretable CNNs. For supervised learning, we demonstrate that the early layers of CNNs do not necessarily need to be learned, and can be replaced with a scattering network instead. Indeed, using hybrid architectures, we achieve the best results with predefined representations to-date, while being competitive with end-to-end learned CNNs. Specifically, even applying a shallow cascade of small-windowed scattering coefficients followed by $1\times 1$1×1-convolutions results in AlexNet accuracy on the ILSVRC2012 classification task. Moreover, by combining scattering networks with deep residual networks, we achieve a single-crop top-5 error of 11.4 percent on ILSVRC2012. Also, we show they can yield excellent performance in the small sample regime on CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets, exceeding their end-to-end counterparts, through their ability to incorporate geometrical priors. For unsupervised learning, scattering coefficients can be a competitive representation that permits image recovery. We use this fact to train hybrid GANs to generate images. Finally, we empirically analyze several properties related to stability and reconstruction of images from scattering coefficients.