  Despite the rapid advancement of unsupervised learning in visual
representation, it requires training on large-scale datasets that demand costly
data collection, and pose additional challenges due to concerns regarding data
privacy. Recently, synthetic images generated by text-to-image diffusion
models, have shown great potential for benefiting image recognition. Although
promising, there has been inadequate exploration dedicated to unsupervised
learning on diffusion-generated images. To address this, we start by uncovering
that diffusion models' cross-attention layers inherently provide
annotation-free attention masks aligned with corresponding text inputs on
generated images. We then investigate the problems of three prevalent
unsupervised learning techniques ( i.e., contrastive learning, masked modeling,
and vision-language pretraining) and introduce customized solutions by fully
exploiting the aforementioned free attention masks. Our approach is validated
through extensive experiments that show consistent improvements in baseline
models across various downstream tasks, including image classification,
detection, segmentation, and image-text retrieval. By utilizing our method, it
is possible to close the performance gap between unsupervised pretraining on
synthetic data and real-world scenarios.
