# SupMAE: Supervised Masked Autoencoders Are Efficient Vision Learners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14540 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14540/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Language Modelling with Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06991/) (2022)
- [Multitask Vision-Language Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11720/) (2022)
- [Joint Embedding vs Reconstruction: Provable Benefits of Latent Space Prediction for Self Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12477/) (2025)
- [Towards All-in-one Pre-training via Maximizing Multi-modal Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09807/) (2022)
- [Masked Image Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06687/) (2024)
- [Masked Autoencoders are Efficient Class Incremental Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12510/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoding Does Not Help Natural Language Supervision at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07836/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models Secretly Understand Neural Network Weights: Enhancing Hypernetwork Architectures with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00838/) (2025)
- [ChA-MAEViT: Unifying Channel-Aware Masked Autoencoders and Multi-Channel Vision Transformers for Improved Cross-Channel Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19331/) (2025)
- [Aerial Image Object Detection With Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12058/) (2023)
- [Masking meets Supervision: A Strong Learning Alliance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11339/) (2023)
- [What's in a Latent? Leveraging Diffusion Latent Space for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06698/) (2025)
- [Self-Guided Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19773/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Hidden Representations in Transfer Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08272/) (2023)
- [Remote Sensing Scene Classification with Masked Image Modeling (MIM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14256/) (2023)
- [Hybrid diffusion models: combining supervised and generative pretraining for label-efficient fine-tuning of segmentation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03433/) (2024)
- [Soften the Mask: Adaptive Temporal Soft Mask for Efficient Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21004/) (2025)
- [Assessing Foundation Models for Mold Colony Detection with Limited Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00561/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised Masked Autoencoders: Unlocking Vision Transformer Potential with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20072/) (2026)
- [Expectation and Acoustic Neural Network Representations Enhance Music Identification from Brain Activity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03190/) (2026)
- [MiTHras: Task-specific Hierarchical Semi-supervised Contrastive Masked Autoencoder for Mitotic Figure Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24736/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, self-supervised Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have attracted unprecedented attention for their impressive representation learning ability. However, the pretext task, Masked Image Modeling (MIM), reconstructs the missing local patches, lacking the global understanding of the image. This paper extends MAE to a fully supervised setting by adding a supervised classification branch, thereby enabling MAE to learn global features from golden labels effectively. The proposed Supervised MAE (SupMAE) only exploits a visible subset of image patches for classification, unlike the standard supervised pre-training where all image patches are used. Through experiments, we demonstrate that SupMAE is not only more training efficient but it also learns more robust and transferable features. Specifically, SupMAE achieves comparable performance with MAE using only 30% of compute when evaluated on ImageNet with the ViT-B/16 model. SupMAE's robustness on ImageNet variants and transfer learning performance outperforms MAE and standard supervised pre-training counterparts. Codes are available at https://github.com/enyac-group/supmae.