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LayerLock: Non-collapsing Representation Learning with Progressive Freezing
Goker Erdogan, Nikhil Parthasarathy, Catalin Ionescu, Drew Hudson, Alexander Lerchner, Andrew Zisserman, Mehdi Sajjadi, Joao Carreira
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10156

LayerLock: Non-collapsing Representation Learning with Progressive Freezing
We introduce LayerLock, a simple yet effective approach for self-supervised visual representation learning, that gradually transitions from pixel to latent prediction through progressive layer freezing. First, we make the observation that during training of video masked-autoencoding (MAE) models, ViT layers converge in the order of their depth: shallower layers converge early, deeper layers converge late. We then show that this observation can be exploited to accelerate standard MAE by progress…