# DeepMIM: Deep Supervision for Masked Image Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08817 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08817/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (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)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Improving Pixel-based MIM by Reducing Wasted Modeling Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00261/) (2023)
- [Rejuvenating image-GPT as Strong Visual Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02147/) (2023)
- [Masked Image Residual Learning for Scaling Deeper Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14136/) (2023)
- [Morphing Tokens Draw Strong Masked Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00254/) (2023)
- [CLICv2: Image Complexity Representation via Content Invariance Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06641/) (2025)
- [Unified Multi-modal Diagnostic Framework with Reconstruction Pre-training and Heterogeneity-combat Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06057/) (2024)
- [Wavelet-Driven Masked Image Modeling: A Path to Efficient Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00782/) (2025)
- [GiVE: Guiding Visual Encoder to Perceive Overlooked Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20109/) (2024)
- [Prior-Guided Residual Diffusion: Calibrated and Efficient Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01330/) (2025)
- [Deep Tensor Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11091/) (2023)
- [Compression-Realized Deep Structural Network for Video Quality Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06342/) (2024)
- [BIMM: Brain Inspired Masked Modeling for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12757/) (2024)
- [Guided Learning: Lubricating End-to-End Modeling for Multi-stage Decision-making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10496/) (2024)
- [From Semantics to Pixels: Coarse-to-Fine Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09955/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Privileged Probabilistic Latent Supervision for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01201/) (2026)
- [Where Predictive Supervision Goes Shapes What VLA Policies Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36645/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep supervision, which involves extra supervisions to the intermediate features of a neural network, was widely used in image classification in the early deep learning era since it significantly reduces the training difficulty and eases the optimization like avoiding gradient vanish over the vanilla training. Nevertheless, with the emergence of normalization techniques and residual connection, deep supervision in image classification was gradually phased out. In this paper, we revisit deep supervision for masked image modeling (MIM) that pre-trains a Vision Transformer (ViT) via a mask-and-predict scheme. Experimentally, we find that deep supervision drives the shallower layers to learn more meaningful representations, accelerates model convergence, and expands attention diversities. Our approach, called DeepMIM, significantly boosts the representation capability of each layer. In addition, DeepMIM is compatible with many MIM models across a range of reconstruction targets. For instance, using ViT-B, DeepMIM on MAE achieves 84.2 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming MAE by +0.6. By combining DeepMIM with a stronger tokenizer CLIP, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks, including image classification (85.6 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, outperforming MAE-CLIP by +0.8), object detection (52.8 APbox on COCO) and semantic segmentation (53.1 mIoU on ADE20K). Code and models are available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/DeepMIM.