Soft Equivariance Regularization for Invariant Self-Supervised Learning
This paper proposes Soft Equivariance Regularization (SER), a lightweight, plug-in method that decouples invariance and equivariance objectives by enforcing equivariance on intermediate spatial features while preserving invariance on the final embedding, thereby improving both linear evaluation accuracy and robustness to geometric perturbations without requiring auxiliary heads or transformation labels.