  We look critically at popular self-supervision techniques for learning deep
convolutional neural networks without manual labels. We show that three
different and representative methods, BiGAN, RotNet and DeepCluster, can learn
the first few layers of a convolutional network from a single image as well as
using millions of images and manual labels, provided that strong data
augmentation is used. However, for deeper layers the gap with manual
supervision cannot be closed even if millions of unlabelled images are used for
training. We conclude that: (1) the weights of the early layers of deep
networks contain limited information about the statistics of natural images,
that (2) such low-level statistics can be learned through self-supervision just
as well as through strong supervision, and that (3) the low-level statistics
can be captured via synthetic transformations instead of using a large image
dataset.
