# Masked autoencoders are effective solution to transformer data-hungry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.05677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05677/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [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)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [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)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Spatial Dimensions of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16302/) (2021)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [DeepViT: Towards Deeper Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11886/) (2021)
- [Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05704/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03884/) (2022)

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

- [Masked Modeling for Self-supervised Representation Learning on Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00897/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Transformers (ViTs) outperforms convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in several vision tasks with its global modeling capabilities. However, ViT lacks the inductive bias inherent to convolution making it require a large amount of data for training. This results in ViT not performing as well as CNNs on small datasets like medicine and science. We experimentally found that masked autoencoders (MAE) can make the transformer focus more on the image itself, thus alleviating the data-hungry issue of ViT to some extent. Yet the current MAE model is too complex resulting in over-fitting problems on small datasets. This leads to a gap between MAEs trained on small datasets and advanced CNNs models still. Therefore, we investigated how to reduce the decoder complexity in MAE and found a more suitable architectural configuration for it with small datasets. Besides, we additionally designed a location prediction task and a contrastive learning task to introduce localization and invariance characteristics for MAE. Our contrastive learning task not only enables the model to learn high-level visual information but also allows the training of MAE's class token. This is something that most MAE improvement efforts do not consider. Extensive experiments have shown that our method shows state-of-the-art performance on standard small datasets as well as medical datasets with few samples compared to the current popular masked image modeling (MIM) and vision transformers for small datasets.The code and models are available at https://github.com/Talented-Q/SDMAE.