ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

Self-Supervised Models Outperform Supervised in Art Classification

publication · 2026-05-20

A new study from arXiv systematically compares supervised and self-supervised feature extractors for artwork classification and retrieval, focusing on paintings. Using DINO family and CLIP models, the researchers found that self-supervised backbones consistently improve classification performance. The work also explores real-world applications like VR museum navigation. The paper is available under Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Key facts

  • Study compares supervised vs self-supervised backbones for art classification
  • Focus on paintings using DINO family and CLIP models
  • Self-supervised backbones consistently improve classification performance
  • Applications include VR museum navigation
  • Published on arXiv under Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Submission history and code/data available
  • arXivLabs framework mentioned for community collaboration
  • Paper ID: 2605.18974

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv
  • arXivLabs

Sources