Visual Representation Learning

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Overview

Visual representation learning studies how to turn images and video into features that preserve information useful for tasks such as classification, segmentation, retrieval, and robotic control. Common approaches include contrastive and masked-image learning, predictive methods such as joint-embedding models, generative objectives, and supervision from language, geometry, or action. Vision foundation models are increasingly evaluated beyond ImageNet classification, on dense prediction, robustness to visual shifts, compositional reasoning, and real-world manipulation. A central tension is how to make features broadly transferable and efficient while retaining fine spatial detail, task-relevant information, and reliability under distribution changes.

Latest papers

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224 papers26 papers in the last four weeks, down 7% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. MeFEm: Medical Face Embedding model

    Feb 16, 2026Yury Borets, Stepan BotmanVisual Representation LearningJoint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

    Sber AI Lab

  2. Semantic Purification for Conditional Representation Learning

    Feb 5, 2026Jiaquan Wang, Yan Lyu, Chen Li +1Disentangled Representation LearningRepresentation Learning

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China · Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Australia

  3. Spotlighting Task-Relevant Features: Object-Centric Representations for Better Generalization in Robotic Manipulation

    Jan 29, 2026Alexandre Chapin, Bruno Machado, Emmanuel Dellandréa +1Visual Representation LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    LIRIS, imagine

  4. MTV: Revisiting Multi-Task Visual Representation Learning

    Jan 20, 2026Shangzhe Di, Zhonghua Zhai, Weidi XieVisual Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

    SAI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · ByteDance Seed

  5. Geometric Stability: The Missing Axis of Representations

    Jan 14, 2026Prashant C. RajuRepresentational Similarity AnalysisNeural Representation Geometry

  6. Enhancing Low-resolution Image Representation Through Normalizing Flows

    Jan 11, 2026Chenglong Bao, Tongyao Pang, Zuowei Shen +2Learned Image CompressionNormalizing Flows

    Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Beijing, China · Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, Singapore +2

  7. Is Generation Required for Data-Efficient Perception?

    Dec 9, 2025Jack Brady, Bernhard Schölkopf, Thomas Kipf +2Visual Representation LearningGenerative Modeling

    Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany · Tübingen AI Center · ELLIS Institute, Tübingen +1

  8. Φeat: Physically Grounded Material Feature Representation

    Nov 14, 2025Giuseppe Vecchio, Adrien Kaiser, Claudia Cuttano +4Representation LearningVisual Representation Learning

    Adobe Research, France

  9. SAGE: Spatial-visual Adaptive Graph Exploration for Efficient Visual Place Recognition

    Sep 30, 2025Shunpeng Chen, Changwei Wang, Rongtao Xu +7Visual Representation LearningGeospatial Representation Learning

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center, Qilu University of Technology · Spatialtemporal AI

  10. SDPose: Exploiting Diffusion Priors for Out-of-Domain and Robust Pose Estimation

    Sep 29, 2025Shuang Liang, Jing He, Lejun Liao +4Human Pose EstimationVisual Representation Learning

    Rama Alpaca Technology · The University of Hong Kong · HKUST (GZ) +3

  11. Improved Robustness from Biologically Inspired Sparse Contrast Representations

    Sep 29, 2025Lorena Stracke, Lia Nimmermann, Shashank Agnihotri +3Distribution Shift RobustnessImage Segmentation

    Media Systems, University of Siegen, Germany · Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim, Germany · Analogue Circuits and Image Sensors, University of Siegen, Germany +1

  12. eVGGT: An Efficient Geometry-Aware Vision Encoder for Visuomotor Policies

    Sep 19, 2025An Dinh Vuong, Minh Nhat Vu, Ian ReidVisual Representation LearningVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Department of Computer Vision, Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE · AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria

  13. Employing Discrete Fourier Transform in Representation Learning

    Jun 7, 2025Raoof HojatJalali, Edmondo TrentinVisual Representation LearningFrequency-Domain Feature Learning

    Universit‘a di Siena, Italy · DIISM, Universit‘a di Siena, Italy

  14. Bringing Generative Learning to Representation Learning: Self-Supervised Transfer Learning as Distribution Matching

    Feb 20, 2025Yuling Jiao, Wensen Ma, Defeng Sun +2Visual Representation LearningDistribution Matching

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, 430072, Wuhan, China · School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China · Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China +2