# MAMO: Masked Multimodal Modeling for Fine-Grained Vision-Language Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04183 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04183/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [LitLLM: A Toolkit for Scientific Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01788/) (2024)
- [EVE: Efficient Vision-Language Pre-training with Masked Prediction and Modality-Aware MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11971/) (2023)
- [Geolocation with Real Human Gameplay Data: A Large-Scale Dataset and Human-Like Reasoning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13759/) (2025)
- [Cross-Modal Causal Intervention for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09117/) (2023)
- [Enhancing EEG-to-Text Decoding through Transferable Representations from Pre-trained Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17433/) (2024)
- [Promoting cross-modal representations to improve multimodal foundation models for physiological signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16424/) (2024)
- [SyncMask: Synchronized Attentional Masking for Fashion-centric Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01156/) (2024)
- [CFIR: Fast and Effective Long-Text To Image Retrieval for Large Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15276/) (2024)
- [Guided Masked Self-Distillation Modeling for Distributed Multimedia Sensor Event Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08264/) (2024)
- [ToVE: Efficient Vision-Language Learning via Knowledge Transfer from Vision Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00691/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Intrinsic Visual Representation Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06281/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal representation learning has shown promising improvements on various vision-language tasks. Most existing methods excel at building global-level alignment between vision and language while lacking effective fine-grained image-text interaction. In this paper, we propose a jointly masked multimodal modeling method to learn fine-grained multimodal representations. Our method performs joint masking on image-text input and integrates both implicit and explicit targets for the masked signals to recover. The implicit target provides a unified and debiased objective for vision and language, where the model predicts latent multimodal representations of the unmasked input. The explicit target further enriches the multimodal representations by recovering high-level and semantically meaningful information: momentum visual features of image patches and concepts of word tokens. Through such a masked modeling process, our model not only learns fine-grained multimodal interaction, but also avoids the semantic gap between high-level representations and low- or mid-level prediction targets (e.g. image pixels), thus producing semantically rich multimodal representations that perform well on both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Our pre-trained model (named MAMO) achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and weakly-supervised visual grounding.