MAP: Unleashing Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone’s Potential with Masked Autoregressive Pretraining

Yunze Liu, Li Yi

Keywords: Hybrid Vision Backbone, Masked Autoregressive, Self-supervised Learning

TL;DR: We propose a new pre-training strategy tailored for the Mamba-Transformer backbone.

Abstract: Mamba has achieved significant advantages in long-context modeling and autoregressive tasks, but its scalability with large parameters remains a major limitation in vision applications. pretraining is a widely used strategy to enhance backbone model performance. Although the success of Masked Autoencoder in Transformer pretraining is well recognized, it does not significantly improve Mamba's visual learning performance. We found that using the correct autoregressive pretraining can significantly boost the performance of the Mamba architecture. Based on this analysis, we propose Masked Autoregressive Pretraining(MAP) to pretrain a hybrid Mamba-Transformer vision backbone network. This strategy combines the strengths of both MAE and Autoregressive pretraining, improving the performance of Mamba and Transformer modules within a unified paradigm. Experimental results show that both the pure Mamba architecture and the hybrid Mamba-Transformer vision backbone network pretrained with MAP significantly outperform other pretraining strategies, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We validate the effectiveness of the method on both 2D and 3D datasets and provide detailed ablation studies to support the design choices for each component.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 2428