  In this work, we introduce a self-supervised feature representation learning
framework DreamTeacher that utilizes generative networks for pre-training
downstream image backbones. We propose to distill knowledge from a trained
generative model into standard image backbones that have been well engineered
for specific perception tasks. We investigate two types of knowledge
distillation: 1) distilling learned generative features onto target image
backbones as an alternative to pretraining these backbones on large labeled
datasets such as ImageNet, and 2) distilling labels obtained from generative
networks with task heads onto logits of target backbones. We perform extensive
analyses on multiple generative models, dense prediction benchmarks, and
several pre-training regimes. We empirically find that our DreamTeacher
significantly outperforms existing self-supervised representation learning
approaches across the board. Unsupervised ImageNet pre-training with
DreamTeacher leads to significant improvements over ImageNet classification
pre-training on downstream datasets, showcasing generative models, and
diffusion generative models specifically, as a promising approach to
representation learning on large, diverse datasets without requiring manual
annotation.
