# Separators in Enhancing Autoregressive Pretraining for Vision Mamba

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03806/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision Mamba backbones, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 49 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Vision Mamba backbones](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/vision-mamba-backbones/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Are we done with ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07159/) (2020)
- [SegMamba: Long-range Sequential Modeling Mamba For 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13560/) (2024)
- [Long Range Language Modeling via Gated State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13947/) (2022)
- [Patch n' Pack: NaViT, a Vision Transformer for any Aspect Ratio and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06304/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The state space model Mamba has recently emerged as a promising paradigm in computer vision, attracting considerable attention for its efficient handling of long-sequence tasks. Its inherent causal structure makes it particularly well suited for autoregressive pretraining. However, existing autoregressive pretraining methods in vision are largely limited to short-sequence settings and may not fully use Mamba's capacity to model longer contexts. To investigate this setting, we introduce SeparaTors for AutoRegressive pretraining (STAR), a new autoregressive pretraining method for Vision Mamba that explicitly marks the boundaries between different images. STAR increases the patch-token sequence length from 144 to 640 by packing four images and four separator clusters. This is approximately 4.4× the ARM patch-token sequence length. The increase is achieved without changing the resolution of any individual image: we use 192×192 inputs for autoregressive pretraining and 224×224 inputs for downstream classification fine-tuning. With this long-sequence pretraining scheme, STAR-B achieves 83.5% EMA top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K after 1,600 epochs of pretraining. The learned representation also transfers beyond in-distribution classification: compared with ARM, STAR-B improves COCO box AP from 46.11 to 46.84 and mask AP from 40.74 to 41.45, while raising the mean top-1 accuracy across five ImageNet robustness benchmarks from 55.1% to 56.8%. Under the evaluated four-image setting, these results indicate that separator-based long-sequence pretraining improves recognition robustness and dense visual prediction relative to ARM.