# Semi-MAE: Masked Autoencoders for Semi-supervised Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01431/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Milking CowMask for Semi-Supervised Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12022/) (2020)
- [Efficient Self-supervised Vision Pretraining with Local Masked Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00790/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11067/) (2021)

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

- [A Masked Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Otago Micro Labels Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12711/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Transformer (ViT) suffers from data scarcity in semi-supervised learning (SSL). To alleviate this issue, inspired by masked autoencoder (MAE), which is a data-efficient self-supervised learner, we propose Semi-MAE, a pure ViT-based SSL framework consisting of a parallel MAE branch to assist the visual representation learning and make the pseudo labels more accurate. The MAE branch is designed as an asymmetric architecture consisting of a lightweight decoder and a shared-weights encoder. We feed the weakly-augmented unlabeled data with a high masking ratio to the MAE branch and reconstruct the missing pixels. Semi-MAE achieves 75.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 10% labels, surpassing prior state-of-the-art in semi-supervised image classification. In addition, extensive experiments demonstrate that Semi-MAE can be readily used for other ViT models and masked image modeling methods.