BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers

Hangbo Bao, Li Dong, Songhao Piao, Furu Wei

Keywords: self-supervised learning, pre-training, vision Transformer

Abstract: We introduce a self-supervised vision representation model BEiT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder representation from Image Transformers. Following BERT developed in the natural language processing area, we propose a masked image modeling task to pretrain vision Transformers. Specifically, each image has two views in our pre-training, i.e., image patches (such as 16 x 16 pixels), and visual tokens (i.e., discrete tokens). We first ``tokenize'' the original image into visual tokens. Then we randomly mask some image patches and fed them into the backbone Transformer. The pre-training objective is to recover the original visual tokens based on the corrupted image patches. After pre-training BEiT, we directly fine-tune the model parameters on downstream tasks by appending task layers upon the pretrained encoder. Experimental results on image classification and semantic segmentation show that our model achieves competitive results with previous pre-training methods.

One-sentence Summary: We propose a masked image modeling task to pretrain vision Transformers.

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2106.08254/code)