# MixMask: Revisiting Masking Strategy for Siamese ConvNets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11456 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11456/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [Masked Autoencoders As Spatiotemporal Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09113/) (2022)
- [Masked Siamese Networks for Label-Efficient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07141/) (2022)
- [MultiMAE: Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01678/) (2022)
- [Intriguing Properties of Contrastive Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02803/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Masked Autoencoders Learn Transferable Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14204/) (2022)
- [OmniMAE: Single Model Masked Pretraining on Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08356/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MaskAnyNet: Rethinking Masked Image Regions as Valuable Information in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12480/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent progress in self-supervised learning has successfully combined Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with Siamese Networks, harnessing the strengths of both methodologies. Nonetheless, certain challenges persist when integrating conventional erase-based masking within Siamese ConvNets. Two primary concerns are: (1) The continuous data processing nature of ConvNets, which doesn't allow for the exclusion of non-informative masked regions, leading to reduced training efficiency compared to ViT architecture; (2) The misalignment between erase-based masking and the contrastive-based objective, distinguishing it from the MIM technique. To address these challenges, this work introduces a novel filling-based masking approach, termed MixMask. The proposed method replaces erased areas with content from a different image, effectively countering the information depletion seen in traditional masking methods. Additionally, we unveil an adaptive loss function that captures the semantics of the newly patched views, ensuring seamless integration within the architectural framework. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments across various datasets and application scenarios. The findings underscore our framework's enhanced performance in areas such as linear probing, semi-supervised and supervised finetuning, object detection and segmentation. Notably, our method surpasses the MSCN, establishing MixMask as a more advantageous masking solution for Siamese ConvNets. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/kirill-vish/MixMask.