  Recent progress in self-supervised learning has resulted in models that are
capable of extracting rich representations from image collections without
requiring any explicit label supervision. However, to date the vast majority of
these approaches have restricted themselves to training on standard benchmark
datasets such as ImageNet. We argue that fine-grained visual categorization
problems, such as plant and animal species classification, provide an
informative testbed for self-supervised learning. In order to facilitate
progress in this area we present two new natural world visual classification
datasets, iNat2021 and NeWT. The former consists of 2.7M images from 10k
different species uploaded by users of the citizen science application
iNaturalist. We designed the latter, NeWT, in collaboration with domain experts
with the aim of benchmarking the performance of representation learning
algorithms on a suite of challenging natural world binary classification tasks
that go beyond standard species classification. These two new datasets allow us
to explore questions related to large-scale representation and transfer
learning in the context of fine-grained categories. We provide a comprehensive
analysis of feature extractors trained with and without supervision on ImageNet
and iNat2021, shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses of different
learned features across a diverse set of tasks. We find that features produced
by standard supervised methods still outperform those produced by
self-supervised approaches such as SimCLR. However, improved self-supervised
learning methods are constantly being released and the iNat2021 and NeWT
datasets are a valuable resource for tracking their progress.
