Does Double Descent Occur in Self-Supervised Learning?

Abstract

Most investigations into double descent have focused on supervised models while the few works studying self-supervised settings find a surprising lack of the phenomenon. These results imply that double descent may not exist in self-supervised models. We show this empirically using a standard and linear autoencoder, two previously unstudied settings. The test loss is found to have either a classical U-shape or to monotonically decrease instead of exhibiting a double-descent curve. We hope that further work on this will help elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon.