# Beyond Masking: Demystifying Token-Based Pre-Training for Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.14313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14313/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00173/) (2022)
- [Fast-iTPN: Integrally Pre-Trained Transformer Pyramid Network with Token Migration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12735/) (2022)
- [HiViT: Hierarchical Vision Transformer Meets Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14949/) (2022)
- [Masked Angle-Aware Autoencoder for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01946/) (2024)
- [Correlational Image Modeling for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12670/) (2023)
- [Pre-training with Random Orthogonal Projection Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18737/) (2023)
- [Deblurring Masked Autoencoder is Better Recipe for Ultrasound Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08249/) (2023)
- [Beyond Pretrained Features: Noisy Image Modeling Provides Adversarial Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01056/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Visual On-Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14144/) (2026)
- [Aerial Image Object Detection With Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12058/) (2023)
- [Understanding and Enhancing Mask-Based Pretraining towards Universal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21650/) (2025)
- [Remote Sensing Scene Classification with Masked Image Modeling (MIM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14256/) (2023)
- [Prompt-based Dynamic Token Pruning for Efficient Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16369/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The past year has witnessed a rapid development of masked image modeling (MIM). MIM is mostly built upon the vision transformers, which suggests that self-supervised visual representations can be done by masking input image parts while requiring the target model to recover the missing contents. MIM has demonstrated promising results on downstream tasks, yet we are interested in whether there exist other effective ways to `learn by recovering missing contents'. In this paper, we investigate this topic by designing five other learning objectives that follow the same procedure as MIM but degrade the input image in different ways. With extensive experiments, we manage to summarize a few design principles for token-based pre-training of vision transformers. In particular, the best practice is obtained by keeping the original image style and enriching spatial masking with spatial misalignment -- this design achieves superior performance over MIM in a series of downstream recognition tasks without extra computational cost. The code is available at https://github.com/sunsmarterjie/beyond_masking.