Masked Swingers: Harnessing Data Augmentation to Advance Autoencoders for Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) removes the need for annotations and makes models that are capable across more domains than supervised learning. The autoencoder SSL framework learns by reconstructing its own input after information loss through a bottleneck or noise injection. Masked autoencoders (MAE) are the most successful instantiation of this framework: they encode a random subset of patches, then decode the masked-out patches. In this work, we introduce key modifications to improve MAEs. Our method augments an image in two different ways, then masks and encodes each view separately. It then exchanges the global representations (CLS tokens) between views before decoding the masked patches. By design, our Masked Swingers encourages learning a view-agnostic summary of the image to facilitate efficient transfer. We perform extensive experiments, and find Masked Swingers outperforms MAE by +3-5% on ImageNet-1K kNN and provides large gains on fine-grained tasks, e.g., relative gains of +45% on instance retrieval, +22% on animal re-ID, and +76% on Omniglot character recognition. To boot, Swingers reduces error -64% relative to MAE on three new state-probing datasets, opening the door to world modeling. Welcome to our Swingers party.