  Despite impressive empirical advances of SSL in solving various tasks, the
problem of understanding and characterizing SSL representations learned from
input data remains relatively under-explored. We provide a comparative analysis
of how the representations produced by SSL models differ when masking parts of
the input. Specifically, we considered state-of-the-art SSL pretrained models,
such as DINOv2, MAE, and SwaV, and analyzed changes at the representation
levels across 4 Image Classification datasets. First, we generate variations of
the datasets by applying foreground and background segmentation. Then, we
conduct statistical analysis using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and
Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) to evaluate the robustness of the
representations learned in SSL models. Empirically, we show that not all models
lead to representations that separate foreground, background, and complete
images. Furthermore, we test different masking strategies by occluding the
center regions of the images to address cases where foreground and background
are difficult. For example, the DTD dataset that focuses on texture rather
specific objects.
