[D] Use VQ-VAEs for SSL?

VQ-VAEs are used successfully to transform images into a representative latent space for diffusion models (LDM). For self supervised learning, however, I can’t find people using them much to create an embedding that can later be used as input to downstream models to predict eg image classes.

Do you have an idea why that is? Intuitively, I would assume VQ-VAEs should also yield quite nice embeddings.

create diffusion diffusion models embedding however image images ldm machinelearning people space ssl supervised learning them