# L-MAE: Masked Autoencoders are Semantic Segmentation Datasets Augmenter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11242/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [Deep learning for universal linear embeddings of nonlinear dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09707/) (2017)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [ST++: Make Self-training Work Better for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05095/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10821/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with High- and Low-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05724/) (2019)
- [Semantic Segmentation with Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05833/) (2021)
- [Improving Semantic Segmentation via Video Propagation and Label Relaxation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01593/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning from a Class-wise Memory Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13415/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating semantic segmentation datasets has consistently been laborious and time-consuming, particularly in the context of large models or specialized domains(i.e. Medical Imaging or Remote Sensing). Specifically, large models necessitate a substantial volume of data, while datasets in professional domains frequently require the involvement of domain experts. Both scenarios are susceptible to inaccurate data labeling, which can significantly affect the ultimate performance of the trained model. This paper proposes a simple and effective label pixel-level completion method, Label Mask AutoEncoder (L-MAE), which fully uses the existing information in the label to generate the complete label. The proposed model are the first to apply the Mask Auto-Encoder to downstream tasks. In detail, L-MAE adopts the fusion strategy that stacks the label and the corresponding image, namely fuse map. Moreover, since some of the image information is lost when masking the fuse map, direct reconstruction may lead to poor performance. We proposed Image Patch Supplement algorithm to supplement the missing information during the mask-reconstruct process, and empirically found that an average of 4.1% mIoU can be improved. We conducted a experiment to evaluate the efficacy of L-MAE to complete the dataset. We employed a degraded Pascal VOC dataset and the degraded dataset enhanced by L-MAE to train an identical conventional semantic segmentation model for the initial set of experiments. The results of these experiments demonstrate a performance enhancement of 13.5% in the model trained with the L-MAE-enhanced dataset compared to the unenhanced dataset.
