Deep Dynamic AutoEncoder for Vision BERT Pretraining

Honghao Chen, Xiangwen Kong, Xiangyu Zhang, Xin Zhao, Kaiqi Huang

Abstract: Recently, masked image modeling (MIM) has demonstrated promising prospects in self-supervised representation learning. However, existing MIM frameworks recover all masked patches equivalently, ignoring that the reconstruction difficulty of different patches can vary sharply due to their diverse distance from visible patches. In this paper, we propose Deep Dynamic AutoEncoder (DDAE), a novel MIM framework that dynamically focuses on patch reconstructions with different degrees of difficulty at different pretraining phases and depths of the model. In addition to raw pixel regression, DDAE performs dynamic feature self-distillation for intermediate layers to learn semantic information. Our methodology provides more locality inductive bias for ViTs, especially in deep layers, which inherently makes up for the absence of local prior for self-attention mechanism. Moreover, our core design deep dynamic supervision can be migrated into existing MIM methods (e.g., MAE, BEiT-v2) seamlessly. The Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. As a tokenizer-free framework, the base-size DDAE can achieve 83.5% top-1 accuracy with only 100 epochs pretraining, surpassing MAE and BEiT pretrained for 800 epochs. For a longer pretraining schedule, DDAE achieves 84.3% top-1 accuracy on Imagenet-1K, and 49.3% mIoU on ADE20K for semantic segmentation.

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