# Contrastive Tuning: A Little Help to Make Masked Autoencoders Forget

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [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)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (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)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00566/) (2023)
- [SpectralEarth: Training Hyperspectral Foundation Models at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08447/) (2024)
- [Can Masked Autoencoders Also Listen to Birds?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12880/) (2025)
- [MIM-Refiner: A Contrastive Learning Boost from Intermediate Pre-Trained Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10093/) (2024)
- [Masked Modeling for Self-supervised Representation Learning on Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00897/) (2023)
- [ViTally Consistent: Scaling Biological Representation Learning for Cell Microscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02572/) (2024)
- [Animal behavioral analysis and neural encoding with transformer-based self-supervised pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09513/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Reclustering Barrier in Centroid-based Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02275/) (2024)
- [DUNIA: Pixel-Sized Embeddings via Cross-Modal Alignment for Earth Observation Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17066/) (2025)
- [STARS: Self-supervised Tuning for 3D Action Recognition in Skeleton Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10935/) (2024)
- [From Pixels to Components: Eigenvector Masking for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06314/) (2025)
- [Text-Guided Alternative Image Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18589/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Learning Based on Transformed Image Reconstruction for Equivariance-Coherent Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18753/) (2025)
- [uaMix-MAE: Efficient Tuning of Pretrained Audio Transformers with Unsupervised Audio Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09579/) (2024)
- [MAGMA: Manifold Regularization for MAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02871/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) methods, like Masked Autoencoders (MAE), efficiently learn a rich representation of the input. However, for adapting to downstream tasks, they require a sufficient amount of labeled data since their rich features code not only objects but also less relevant image background. In contrast, Instance Discrimination (ID) methods focus on objects. In this work, we study how to combine the efficiency and scalability of MIM with the ability of ID to perform downstream classification in the absence of large amounts of labeled data. To this end, we introduce Masked Autoencoder Contrastive Tuning (MAE-CT), a sequential approach that utilizes the implicit clustering of the Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning (NNCLR) objective to induce abstraction in the topmost layers of a pre-trained MAE. MAE-CT tunes the rich features such that they form semantic clusters of objects without using any labels. Notably, MAE-CT does not rely on hand-crafted augmentations and frequently achieves its best performances while using only minimal augmentations (crop & flip). Further, MAE-CT is compute efficient as it requires at most 10% overhead compared to MAE re-training. Applied to large and huge Vision Transformer (ViT) models, MAE-CT excels over previous self-supervised methods trained on ImageNet in linear probing, k-NN and low-shot classification accuracy as well as in unsupervised clustering accuracy. With ViT-H/16 MAE-CT achieves a new state-of-the-art in linear probing of 82.2%.