Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations (i.e., unfaithful or nonsensical information) when serving as AI assistants in various domains. Since hallucinations always come with truthful content in the LLM responses, previous factuality alignment methods that conduct response-level preference learning inevitably introduced noises during training. Therefore, this paper proposes a fine-grained factuality alignment method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), called Mask-DPO. Incorporating sentence-level factuality as mask signals, Mask-DPO only learns from factually correct sentences in the preferred samples and prevents the penalty on factual contents in the not preferred samples, which resolves the ambiguity in the preference learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Mask-DPO can significantly improve the factuality of LLMs responses to questions from both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, although these questions and their corresponding topics are unseen during training. Only trained on the ANAH train set, the score of Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on the ANAH test set is improved from 49.19% to 77.53%, even surpassing the score of Llama3.1-70B-Instruct (53.44%), while its FactScore on the out-of-domain Biography dataset is also improved from 30.29% to 39.39%. We further study the generalization property of Mask-DPO using different training sample scaling strategies and find that scaling the number of topics in the dataset is more effective than the number of questions. We provide a hypothesis of what factual alignment is doing with LLMs, on the implication of this phenomenon, and conduct proof-of-concept experiments to verify it. We hope the method and the findings pave the way for future research on scaling factuality alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are discovered to suffer from accurately retrieving key information. To address this, we propose Mask-Enhanced Autoregressive Prediction (MEAP), a simple yet effective training paradigm that seamlessly integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) into Next-Token Prediction (NTP) to enhance the latter's in-context retrieval capabilities. Specifically, MEAP first randomly masks a small fraction of input tokens and then directly performs the standard next-token prediction autoregressive using a decoder-only Transformer. MEAP eliminates the need for bidirectional attention or encoder-decoder architectures for MLM, incurring no additional computational overhead during pre-training or inference. Intensive experiments demonstrate that MEAP substantially outperforms NTP on key information retrieval and long-context reasoning tasks, while performing on par or better on commonsense reasoning tasks. The benefits of MEAP also extend to supervised fine-tuning, where it shows remarkable advantages in lost-in-the-middle scenarios, outperforming NTP by 11.77 percentage points. Our analysis indicates that MEAP's effectiveness arises from its ability to promote more distinguishable attention scores by concentrating on a reduced set of non-masked tokens. This mechanism improves the model's focus on task-relevant signals while mitigating the influence of peripheral context. These findings position MEAP as a promising training paradigm for large language models.

In generative models, two paradigms have gained attraction in various applications: next-set prediction-based Masked Generative Models and next-noise prediction-based Non-Autoregressive Models, e.g., Diffusion Models. In this work, we propose using discrete-state models to connect them and explore their scalability in the vision domain. First, we conduct a step-by-step analysis in a unified design space across two types of models including timestep-independence, noise schedule, temperature, guidance strength, etc in a scalable manner. Second, we re-cast typical discriminative tasks, e.g., image segmentation, as an unmasking process from [MASK]tokens on a discrete-state model. This enables us to perform various sampling processes, including flexible conditional sampling by only training once to model the joint distribution. All aforementioned explorations lead to our framework named Discrete Interpolants, which enables us to achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance compared to previous discrete-state based methods in various benchmarks, like ImageNet256, MS COCO, and video dataset FaceForensics. In summary, by leveraging [MASK] in discrete-state models, we can bridge Masked Generative and Non-autoregressive Diffusion models, as well as generative and discriminative tasks.

In this paper, we aim to study how to build a strong instance segmenter with minimal training time and GPUs, as opposed to the majority of current approaches that pursue more accurate instance segmenter by building more advanced frameworks at the cost of longer training time and higher GPU requirements. To achieve this, we introduce a simple and general framework, termed Mask Frozen-DETR, which can convert any existing DETR-based object detection model into a powerful instance segmentation model. Our method only requires training an additional lightweight mask network that predicts instance masks within the bounding boxes given by a frozen DETR-based object detector. Remarkably, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art instance segmentation method Mask DINO in terms of performance on the COCO test-dev split (55.3% vs. 54.7%) while being over 10X times faster to train. Furthermore, all of our experiments can be trained using only one Tesla V100 GPU with 16 GB of memory, demonstrating the significant efficiency of our proposed framework.

Text-to-image generation has witnessed great progress, especially with the recent advancements in diffusion models. Since texts cannot provide detailed conditions like object appearance, reference images are usually leveraged for the control of objects in the generated images. However, existing methods still suffer limited accuracy when the relationship between the foreground and background is complicated. To address this issue, we develop a framework termed Mask-ControlNet by introducing an additional mask prompt. Specifically, we first employ large vision models to obtain masks to segment the objects of interest in the reference image. Then, the object images are employed as additional prompts to facilitate the diffusion model to better understand the relationship between foreground and background regions during image generation. Experiments show that the mask prompts enhance the controllability of the diffusion model to maintain higher fidelity to the reference image while achieving better image quality. Comparison with previous text-to-image generation methods demonstrates our method's superior quantitative and qualitative performance on the benchmark datasets.

Textual label names (descriptions) are typically semantically rich in many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we incorporate the prompting methodology, which is widely used to enrich model input, into the label side for the first time. Specifically, we propose a Mask Matching method, which equips an input with a prompt and its label with another, and then makes predictions by matching their mask representations. We evaluate our method extensively on 8 NLU tasks with 14 datasets. The experimental results show that Mask Matching significantly outperforms its counterparts of fine-tuning and conventional prompt-tuning, setting up state-of-the-art performances in several datasets. Mask Matching is particularly good at handling NLU tasks with large label counts and informative label names. As pioneering efforts that investigate the label-side prompt, we also discuss open issues for future study.

Recently, transformer-based methods have dominated 3D instance segmentation, where mask attention is commonly involved. Specifically, object queries are guided by the initial instance masks in the first cross-attention, and then iteratively refine themselves in a similar manner. However, we observe that the mask-attention pipeline usually leads to slow convergence due to low-recall initial instance masks. Therefore, we abandon the mask attention design and resort to an auxiliary center regression task instead. Through center regression, we effectively overcome the low-recall issue and perform cross-attention by imposing positional prior. To reach this goal, we develop a series of position-aware designs. First, we learn a spatial distribution of 3D locations as the initial position queries. They spread over the 3D space densely, and thus can easily capture the objects in a scene with a high recall. Moreover, we present relative position encoding for the cross-attention and iterative refinement for more accurate position queries. Experiments show that our approach converges 4x faster than existing work, sets a new state of the art on ScanNetv2 3D instance segmentation benchmark, and also demonstrates superior performance across various datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Mask-Attention-Free-Transformer.

Most Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) exhibit limited generalization capabilities, which restrict their applicability in representing multiple scenes using a single model. To address this problem, existing generalizable NeRF methods simply condition the model on image features. These methods still struggle to learn precise global representations over diverse scenes since they lack an effective mechanism for interacting among different points and views. In this work, we unveil that 3D implicit representation learning can be significantly improved by mask-based modeling. Specifically, we propose masked ray and view modeling for generalizable NeRF (MRVM-NeRF), which is a self-supervised pretraining target to predict complete scene representations from partially masked features along each ray. With this pretraining target, MRVM-NeRF enables better use of correlations across different points and views as the geometry priors, which thereby strengthens the capability of capturing intricate details within the scenes and boosts the generalization capability across different scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed MRVM-NeRF on both synthetic and real-world datasets, qualitatively and quantitatively. Besides, we also conduct experiments to show the compatibility of our proposed method with various backbones and its superiority under few-shot cases.

The recent advancement in Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) has largely been driven by the use of deeper and increasingly data-hungry transformer-based models. However, video masks are tedious and expensive to annotate, limiting the scale and diversity of existing VIS datasets. In this work, we aim to remove the mask-annotation requirement. We propose MaskFreeVIS, achieving highly competitive VIS performance, while only using bounding box annotations for the object state. We leverage the rich temporal mask consistency constraints in videos by introducing the Temporal KNN-patch Loss (TK-Loss), providing strong mask supervision without any labels. Our TK-Loss finds one-to-many matches across frames, through an efficient patch-matching step followed by a K-nearest neighbor selection. A consistency loss is then enforced on the found matches. Our mask-free objective is simple to implement, has no trainable parameters, is computationally efficient, yet outperforms baselines employing, e.g., state-of-the-art optical flow to enforce temporal mask consistency. We validate MaskFreeVIS on the YouTube-VIS 2019/2021, OVIS and BDD100K MOTS benchmarks. The results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of our method by drastically narrowing the gap between fully and weakly-supervised VIS performance. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/SysCV/MaskFreeVis.

The pre-training of masked language models (MLMs) consumes massive computation to achieve good results on downstream NLP tasks, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In the vanilla MLM, the virtual tokens, [MASK]s, act as placeholders and gather the contextualized information from unmasked tokens to restore the corrupted information. It raises the question of whether we can append [MASK]s at a later layer, to reduce the sequence length for earlier layers and make the pre-training more efficient. We show: (1) [MASK]s can indeed be appended at a later layer, being disentangled from the word embedding; (2) The gathering of contextualized information from unmasked tokens can be conducted with a few layers. By further increasing the masking rate from 15% to 50%, we can pre-train RoBERTa-base and RoBERTa-large from scratch with only 78% and 68% of the original computational budget without any degradation on the GLUE benchmark. When pre-training with the original budget, our method outperforms RoBERTa for 6 out of 8 GLUE tasks, on average by 0.4%.

In this paper we present Mask DINO, a unified object detection and segmentation framework. Mask DINO extends DINO (DETR with Improved Denoising Anchor Boxes) by adding a mask prediction branch which supports all image segmentation tasks (instance, panoptic, and semantic). It makes use of the query embeddings from DINO to dot-product a high-resolution pixel embedding map to predict a set of binary masks. Some key components in DINO are extended for segmentation through a shared architecture and training process. Mask DINO is simple, efficient, and scalable, and it can benefit from joint large-scale detection and segmentation datasets. Our experiments show that Mask DINO significantly outperforms all existing specialized segmentation methods, both on a ResNet-50 backbone and a pre-trained model with SwinL backbone. Notably, Mask DINO establishes the best results to date on instance segmentation (54.5 AP on COCO), panoptic segmentation (59.4 PQ on COCO), and semantic segmentation (60.8 mIoU on ADE20K) among models under one billion parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/IDEACVR/MaskDINO.

Two-stage and query-based instance segmentation methods have achieved remarkable results. However, their segmented masks are still very coarse. In this paper, we present Mask Transfiner for high-quality and efficient instance segmentation. Instead of operating on regular dense tensors, our Mask Transfiner decomposes and represents the image regions as a quadtree. Our transformer-based approach only processes detected error-prone tree nodes and self-corrects their errors in parallel. While these sparse pixels only constitute a small proportion of the total number, they are critical to the final mask quality. This allows Mask Transfiner to predict highly accurate instance masks, at a low computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mask Transfiner outperforms current instance segmentation methods on three popular benchmarks, significantly improving both two-stage and query-based frameworks by a large margin of +3.0 mask AP on COCO and BDD100K, and +6.6 boundary AP on Cityscapes. Our code and trained models will be available at http://vis.xyz/pub/transfiner.

Due to the large success in object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN attracts great attention and is widely adopted as a strong baseline for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and spotting. However, two issues remain to be settled. The first is dense text case, which is easy to be neglected but quite practical. There may exist multiple instances in one proposal, which makes it difficult for the mask head to distinguish different instances and degrades the performance. In this work, we argue that the performance degradation results from the learning confusion issue in the mask head. We propose to use an MLP decoder instead of the "deconv-conv" decoder in the mask head, which alleviates the issue and promotes robustness significantly. And we propose instance-aware mask learning in which the mask head learns to predict the shape of the whole instance rather than classify each pixel to text or non-text. With instance-aware mask learning, the mask branch can learn separated and compact masks. The second is that due to large variations in scale and aspect ratio, RPN needs complicated anchor settings, making it hard to maintain and transfer across different datasets. To settle this issue, we propose an adaptive label assignment in which all instances especially those with extreme aspect ratios are guaranteed to be associated with enough anchors. Equipped with these components, the proposed method named MAYOR achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks including DAST1500, MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, CTW1500, and Total-Text.

Word alignment, which aims to align translationally equivalent words between source and target sentences, plays an important role in many natural language processing tasks. Current unsupervised neural alignment methods focus on inducing alignments from neural machine translation models, which does not leverage the full context in the target sequence. In this paper, we propose Mask-Align, a self-supervised word alignment model that takes advantage of the full context on the target side. Our model masks out each target token and predicts it conditioned on both source and the remaining target tokens. This two-step process is based on the assumption that the source token contributing most to recovering the masked target token should be aligned. We also introduce an attention variant called leaky attention, which alleviates the problem of unexpected high cross-attention weights on special tokens such as periods. Experiments on four language pairs show that our model outperforms previous unsupervised neural aligners and obtains new state-of-the-art results.

We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for object instance segmentation. Our approach efficiently detects objects in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality segmentation mask for each instance. The method, called Mask R-CNN, extends Faster R-CNN by adding a branch for predicting an object mask in parallel with the existing branch for bounding box recognition. Mask R-CNN is simple to train and adds only a small overhead to Faster R-CNN, running at 5 fps. Moreover, Mask R-CNN is easy to generalize to other tasks, e.g., allowing us to estimate human poses in the same framework. We show top results in all three tracks of the COCO suite of challenges, including instance segmentation, bounding-box object detection, and person keypoint detection. Without bells and whistles, Mask R-CNN outperforms all existing, single-model entries on every task, including the COCO 2016 challenge winners. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in instance-level recognition. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron

Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their massive parameter counts, which typically result in significant redundancy. This work introduces MaskLLM, a learnable pruning method that establishes Semi-structured (or ``N:M'') Sparsity in LLMs, aimed at reducing computational overhead during inference. Instead of developing a new importance criterion, MaskLLM explicitly models N:M patterns as a learnable distribution through Gumbel Softmax sampling. This approach facilitates end-to-end training on large-scale datasets and offers two notable advantages: 1) High-quality Masks - our method effectively scales to large datasets and learns accurate masks; 2) Transferability - the probabilistic modeling of mask distribution enables the transfer learning of sparsity across domains or tasks. We assessed MaskLLM using 2:4 sparsity on various LLMs, including LLaMA-2, Nemotron-4, and GPT-3, with sizes ranging from 843M to 15B parameters, and our empirical results show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. For instance, leading approaches achieve a perplexity (PPL) of 10 or greater on Wikitext compared to the dense model's 5.12 PPL, but MaskLLM achieves a significantly lower 6.72 PPL solely by learning the masks with frozen weights. Furthermore, MaskLLM's learnable nature allows customized masks for lossless application of 2:4 sparsity to downstream tasks or domains. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/MaskLLM.

World models that forecast environmental changes from actions are vital for autonomous driving models with strong generalization. The prevailing driving world model mainly build on video prediction model. Although these models can produce high-fidelity video sequences with advanced diffusion-based generator, they are constrained by their predictive duration and overall generalization capabilities. In this paper, we explore to solve this problem by combining generation loss with MAE-style feature-level context learning. In particular, we instantiate this target with three key design: (1) A more scalable Diffusion Transformer (DiT) structure trained with extra mask construction task. (2) we devise diffusion-related mask tokens to deal with the fuzzy relations between mask reconstruction and generative diffusion process. (3) we extend mask construction task to spatial-temporal domain by utilizing row-wise mask for shifted self-attention rather than masked self-attention in MAE. Then, we adopt a row-wise cross-view module to align with this mask design. Based on above improvement, we propose MaskGWM: a Generalizable driving World Model embodied with Video Mask reconstruction. Our model contains two variants: MaskGWM-long, focusing on long-horizon prediction, and MaskGWM-mview, dedicated to multi-view generation. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which contain normal validation of Nuscene dataset, long-horizon rollout of OpenDV-2K dataset and zero-shot validation of Waymo dataset. Quantitative metrics on these datasets show our method notably improving state-of-the-art driving world model.

We present MaskLID, a simple, yet effective, code-switching (CS) language identification (LID) method. MaskLID does not require any training and is designed to complement current high-performance sentence-level LIDs. Sentence-level LIDs are classifiers trained on monolingual texts to provide single labels, typically using a softmax layer to turn scores into probabilities. However, in cases where a sentence is composed in both L1 and L2 languages, the LID classifier often only returns the dominant label L1. To address this limitation, MaskLID employs a strategy to mask text features associated with L1, allowing the LID to classify the text as L2 in the next round. This method uses the LID itself to identify the features that require masking and does not rely on any external resource. In this work, we explore the use of MaskLID for two open-source LIDs (GlotLID and OpenLID), that are both based on the FastText architecture. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/MaskLID.

The recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) systems are usually grouped as autoregressive and non-autoregressive systems. The autoregressive systems implicitly model duration but exhibit certain deficiencies in robustness and lack of duration controllability. Non-autoregressive systems require explicit alignment information between text and speech during training and predict durations for linguistic units (e.g. phone), which may compromise their naturalness. In this paper, we introduce Masked Generative Codec Transformer (MaskGCT), a fully non-autoregressive TTS model that eliminates the need for explicit alignment information between text and speech supervision, as well as phone-level duration prediction. MaskGCT is a two-stage model: in the first stage, the model uses text to predict semantic tokens extracted from a speech self-supervised learning (SSL) model, and in the second stage, the model predicts acoustic tokens conditioned on these semantic tokens. MaskGCT follows the mask-and-predict learning paradigm. During training, MaskGCT learns to predict masked semantic or acoustic tokens based on given conditions and prompts. During inference, the model generates tokens of a specified length in a parallel manner. Experiments with 100K hours of in-the-wild speech demonstrate that MaskGCT outperforms the current state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS systems in terms of quality, similarity, and intelligibility. Audio samples are available at https://maskgct.github.io/.

This paper shows that masked autoencoders (MAE) are scalable self-supervised learners for computer vision. Our MAE approach is simple: we mask random patches of the input image and reconstruct the missing pixels. It is based on two core designs. First, we develop an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture, with an encoder that operates only on the visible subset of patches (without mask tokens), along with a lightweight decoder that reconstructs the original image from the latent representation and mask tokens. Second, we find that masking a high proportion of the input image, e.g., 75%, yields a nontrivial and meaningful self-supervisory task. Coupling these two designs enables us to train large models efficiently and effectively: we accelerate training (by 3x or more) and improve accuracy. Our scalable approach allows for learning high-capacity models that generalize well: e.g., a vanilla ViT-Huge model achieves the best accuracy (87.8%) among methods that use only ImageNet-1K data. Transfer performance in downstream tasks outperforms supervised pre-training and shows promising scaling behavior.

Scaling the size of a model enhances its capabilities but significantly increases computation complexity. Mixture-of-Experts models (MoE) address the issue by allowing model size to scale up without substantially increasing training or inference costs. Despite their promising results, MoE models encounter several challenges. Primarily, for dynamic routing methods, the dispersion of training tokens across multiple experts can lead to underfitting, particularly for infrequent tokens. Additionally, while fixed routing methods can mitigate that issue, they compromise on the diversity of representations. In this paper, we propose MaskMoE, a method designed to enhance token-level learning by employing a routing masking technique within the Mixture-of-Experts model. MaskMoE is capable of maintaining representation diversity while achieving more comprehensive training. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous dominant Mixture-of-Experts models in terms of both perplexity (PPL) and downstream task performance.

Accurately perceiving and tracking instances over time is essential for the decision-making processes of autonomous agents interacting safely in dynamic environments. With this intention, we propose Mask4Former for the challenging task of 4D panoptic segmentation of LiDAR point clouds. Mask4Former is the first transformer-based approach unifying semantic instance segmentation and tracking of sparse and irregular sequences of 3D point clouds into a single joint model. Our model directly predicts semantic instances and their temporal associations without relying on hand-crafted non-learned association strategies such as probabilistic clustering or voting-based center prediction. Instead, Mask4Former introduces spatio-temporal instance queries that encode the semantic and geometric properties of each semantic tracklet in the sequence. In an in-depth study, we find that promoting spatially compact instance predictions is critical as spatio-temporal instance queries tend to merge multiple semantically similar instances, even if they are spatially distant. To this end, we regress 6-DOF bounding box parameters from spatio-temporal instance queries, which are used as an auxiliary task to foster spatially compact predictions. Mask4Former achieves a new state-of-the-art on the SemanticKITTI test set with a score of 68.4 LSTQ.

Despite its success in image synthesis, we observe that diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) often lack contextual reasoning ability to learn the relations among object parts in an image, leading to a slow learning process. To solve this issue, we propose a Masked Diffusion Transformer (MDT) that introduces a mask latent modeling scheme to explicitly enhance the DPMs' ability of contextual relation learning among object semantic parts in an image. During training, MDT operates on the latent space to mask certain tokens. Then, an asymmetric masking diffusion transformer is designed to predict masked tokens from unmasked ones while maintaining the diffusion generation process. Our MDT can reconstruct the full information of an image from its incomplete contextual input, thus enabling it to learn the associated relations among image tokens. Experimental results show that MDT achieves superior image synthesis performance, e.g. a new SoTA FID score on the ImageNet dataset, and has about 3x faster learning speed than the previous SoTA DiT. The source code is released at https://github.com/sail-sg/MDT.

Masked language models (MLMs) conventionally mask 15% of tokens due to the belief that more masking would leave insufficient context to learn good representations; this masking rate has been widely used, regardless of model sizes or masking strategies. In this work, we revisit this important choice of MLM pre-training. We first establish that 15% is not universally optimal, and larger models should adopt a higher masking rate. Specifically, we find that masking 40% outperforms 15% for BERT-large size models on GLUE and SQuAD. Interestingly, an extremely high masking rate of 80% can still preserve 95% fine-tuning performance and most of the accuracy in linguistic probing, challenging the conventional wisdom about the role of the masking rate. We then examine the interplay between masking rates and masking strategies and find that uniform masking requires a higher masking rate compared to sophisticated masking strategies such as span or PMI masking. Finally, we argue that increasing the masking rate has two distinct effects: it leads to more corruption, which makes the prediction task more difficult; it also enables more predictions, which benefits optimization. Using this framework, we revisit BERT's 80-10-10 corruption strategy. Together, our results contribute to a better understanding of MLM pre-training.

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many self-supervised representation learning tasks. MLMs are trained by randomly masking portions of the input sequences with [MASK] tokens and learning to reconstruct the original content based on the remaining context. This paper explores the impact of [MASK] tokens on MLMs. Analytical studies show that masking tokens can introduce the corrupted semantics problem, wherein the corrupted context may convey multiple, ambiguous meanings. This problem is also a key factor affecting the performance of MLMs on downstream tasks. Based on these findings, we propose a novel enhanced-context MLM, ExLM. Our approach expands [MASK] tokens in the input context and models the dependencies between these expanded states. This enhancement increases context capacity and enables the model to capture richer semantic information, effectively mitigating the corrupted semantics problem during pre-training. Experimental results demonstrate that ExLM achieves significant performance improvements in both text modeling and SMILES modeling tasks. Further analysis confirms that ExLM enriches semantic representations through context enhancement, and effectively reduces the semantic multimodality commonly observed in MLMs.

In this paper, we introduce Mask2Map, a novel end-to-end online HD map construction method designed for autonomous driving applications. Our approach focuses on predicting the class and ordered point set of map instances within a scene, represented in the bird's eye view (BEV). Mask2Map consists of two primary components: the Instance-Level Mask Prediction Network (IMPNet) and the Mask-Driven Map Prediction Network (MMPNet). IMPNet generates Mask-Aware Queries and BEV Segmentation Masks to capture comprehensive semantic information globally. Subsequently, MMPNet enhances these query features using local contextual information through two submodules: the Positional Query Generator (PQG) and the Geometric Feature Extractor (GFE). PQG extracts instance-level positional queries by embedding BEV positional information into Mask-Aware Queries, while GFE utilizes BEV Segmentation Masks to generate point-level geometric features. However, we observed limited performance in Mask2Map due to inter-network inconsistency stemming from different predictions to Ground Truth (GT) matching between IMPNet and MMPNet. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Inter-network Denoising Training method, which guides the model to denoise the output affected by both noisy GT queries and perturbed GT Segmentation Masks. Our evaluation conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrates that Mask2Map achieves remarkable performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, with gains of 10.1% mAP and 4.1 mAP, respectively. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SehwanChoi0307/Mask2Map.

Learning Rate Rewinding (LRR) has been established as a strong variant of Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) to find lottery tickets in deep overparameterized neural networks. While both iterative pruning schemes couple structure and parameter learning, understanding how LRR excels in both aspects can bring us closer to the design of more flexible deep learning algorithms that can optimize diverse sets of sparse architectures. To this end, we conduct experiments that disentangle the effect of mask learning and parameter optimization and how both benefit from overparameterization. The ability of LRR to flip parameter signs early and stay robust to sign perturbations seems to make it not only more effective in mask identification but also in optimizing diverse sets of masks, including random ones. In support of this hypothesis, we prove in a simplified single hidden neuron setting that LRR succeeds in more cases than IMP, as it can escape initially problematic sign configurations.

Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to match persons who change clothes over long periods. The key challenge in CC-ReID is to extract clothing-independent features, such as face, hairstyle, body shape, and gait. Current research mainly focuses on modeling body shape using multi-modal biological features (such as silhouettes and sketches). However, it does not fully leverage the personal description information hidden in the original RGB image. Considering that there are certain attribute descriptions which remain unchanged after the changing of cloth, we propose a Masked Attribute Description Embedding (MADE) method that unifies personal visual appearance and attribute description for CC-ReID. Specifically, handling variable clothing-sensitive information, such as color and type, is challenging for effective modeling. To address this, we mask the clothing and color information in the personal attribute description extracted through an attribute detection model. The masked attribute description is then connected and embedded into Transformer blocks at various levels, fusing it with the low-level to high-level features of the image. This approach compels the model to discard clothing information. Experiments are conducted on several CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, Celeb-reID-light, and LaST. Results demonstrate that MADE effectively utilizes attribute description, enhancing cloth-changing person re-identification performance, and compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/moon-wh/MADE.

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

When capturing and storing images, devices inevitably introduce noise. Reducing this noise is a critical task called image denoising. Deep learning has become the de facto method for image denoising, especially with the emergence of Transformer-based models that have achieved notable state-of-the-art results on various image tasks. However, deep learning-based methods often suffer from a lack of generalization ability. For example, deep models trained on Gaussian noise may perform poorly when tested on other noise distributions. To address this issue, we present a novel approach to enhance the generalization performance of denoising networks, known as masked training. Our method involves masking random pixels of the input image and reconstructing the missing information during training. We also mask out the features in the self-attention layers to avoid the impact of training-testing inconsistency. Our approach exhibits better generalization ability than other deep learning models and is directly applicable to real-world scenarios. Additionally, our interpretability analysis demonstrates the superiority of our method.

Deep learning models are challenged by the distribution shift between the training data and test data. Recently, the large models pre-trained on diverse data have demonstrated unprecedented robustness to various distribution shifts. However, fine-tuning these models can lead to a trade-off between in-distribution (ID) performance and out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Existing methods for tackling this trade-off do not explicitly address the OOD robustness problem. In this paper, based on causal analysis of the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel fine-tuning method, which uses masked images as counterfactual samples that help improve the robustness of the fine-tuning model. Specifically, we mask either the semantics-related or semantics-unrelated patches of the images based on class activation map to break the spurious correlation, and refill the masked patches with patches from other images. The resulting counterfactual samples are used in feature-based distillation with the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments verify that regularizing the fine-tuning with the proposed masked images can achieve a better trade-off between ID and OOD performance, surpassing previous methods on the OOD performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Coxy7/robust-finetuning.

We are interested in learning scalable agents for reinforcement learning that can learn from large-scale, diverse sequential data similar to current large vision and language models. To this end, this paper presents masked decision prediction (MaskDP), a simple and scalable self-supervised pretraining method for reinforcement learning (RL) and behavioral cloning (BC). In our MaskDP approach, we employ a masked autoencoder (MAE) to state-action trajectories, wherein we randomly mask state and action tokens and reconstruct the missing data. By doing so, the model is required to infer masked-out states and actions and extract information about dynamics. We find that masking different proportions of the input sequence significantly helps with learning a better model that generalizes well to multiple downstream tasks. In our empirical study, we find that a MaskDP model gains the capability of zero-shot transfer to new BC tasks, such as single and multiple goal reaching, and it can zero-shot infer skills from a few example transitions. In addition, MaskDP transfers well to offline RL and shows promising scaling behavior w.r.t. to model size. It is amenable to data-efficient finetuning, achieving competitive results with prior methods based on autoregressive pretraining.

Masked image modelling (e.g., Masked AutoEncoder) and contrastive learning (e.g., Momentum Contrast) have shown impressive performance on unsupervised visual representation learning. This work presents Masked Contrastive Representation Learning (MACRL) for self-supervised visual pre-training. In particular, MACRL leverages the effectiveness of both masked image modelling and contrastive learning. We adopt an asymmetric setting for the siamese network (i.e., encoder-decoder structure in both branches), where one branch with higher mask ratio and stronger data augmentation, while the other adopts weaker data corruptions. We optimize a contrastive learning objective based on the learned features from the encoder in both branches. Furthermore, we minimize the L_1 reconstruction loss according to the decoders' outputs. In our experiments, MACRL presents superior results on various vision benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and two other ImageNet subsets. Our framework provides unified insights on self-supervised visual pre-training and future research.

Modern 3D semantic instance segmentation approaches predominantly rely on specialized voting mechanisms followed by carefully designed geometric clustering techniques. Building on the successes of recent Transformer-based methods for object detection and image segmentation, we propose the first Transformer-based approach for 3D semantic instance segmentation. We show that we can leverage generic Transformer building blocks to directly predict instance masks from 3D point clouds. In our model called Mask3D each object instance is represented as an instance query. Using Transformer decoders, the instance queries are learned by iteratively attending to point cloud features at multiple scales. Combined with point features, the instance queries directly yield all instance masks in parallel. Mask3D has several advantages over current state-of-the-art approaches, since it neither relies on (1) voting schemes which require hand-selected geometric properties (such as centers) nor (2) geometric grouping mechanisms requiring manually-tuned hyper-parameters (e.g. radii) and (3) enables a loss that directly optimizes instance masks. Mask3D sets a new state-of-the-art on ScanNet test (+6.2 mAP), S3DIS 6-fold (+10.1 mAP), STPLS3D (+11.2 mAP) and ScanNet200 test (+12.4 mAP).

This paper studies a simple extension of image-based Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to self-supervised representation learning from audio spectrograms. Following the Transformer encoder-decoder design in MAE, our Audio-MAE first encodes audio spectrogram patches with a high masking ratio, feeding only the non-masked tokens through encoder layers. The decoder then re-orders and decodes the encoded context padded with mask tokens, in order to reconstruct the input spectrogram. We find it beneficial to incorporate local window attention in the decoder, as audio spectrograms are highly correlated in local time and frequency bands. We then fine-tune the encoder with a lower masking ratio on target datasets. Empirically, Audio-MAE sets new state-of-the-art performance on six audio and speech classification tasks, outperforming other recent models that use external supervised pre-training. The code and models will be at https://github.com/facebookresearch/AudioMAE.

The ability to predict future visual observations conditioned on past observations and motor commands can enable embodied agents to plan solutions to a variety of tasks in complex environments. This work shows that we can create good video prediction models by pre-training transformers via masked visual modeling. Our approach, named MaskViT, is based on two simple design decisions. First, for memory and training efficiency, we use two types of window attention: spatial and spatiotemporal. Second, during training, we mask a variable percentage of tokens instead of a fixed mask ratio. For inference, MaskViT generates all tokens via iterative refinement where we incrementally decrease the masking ratio following a mask scheduling function. On several datasets we demonstrate that MaskViT outperforms prior works in video prediction, is parameter efficient, and can generate high-resolution videos (256x256). Further, we demonstrate the benefits of inference speedup (up to 512x) due to iterative decoding by using MaskViT for planning on a real robot. Our work suggests that we can endow embodied agents with powerful predictive models by leveraging the general framework of masked visual modeling with minimal domain knowledge.

This paper studies a conceptually simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. We randomly mask out spacetime patches in videos and learn an autoencoder to reconstruct them in pixels. Interestingly, we show that our MAE method can learn strong representations with almost no inductive bias on spacetime (only except for patch and positional embeddings), and spacetime-agnostic random masking performs the best. We observe that the optimal masking ratio is as high as 90% (vs. 75% on images), supporting the hypothesis that this ratio is related to information redundancy of the data. A high masking ratio leads to a large speedup, e.g., > 4x in wall-clock time or even more. We report competitive results on several challenging video datasets using vanilla Vision Transformers. We observe that MAE can outperform supervised pre-training by large margins. We further report encouraging results of training on real-world, uncurated Instagram data. Our study suggests that the general framework of masked autoencoding (BERT, MAE, etc.) can be a unified methodology for representation learning with minimal domain knowledge.

Image segmentation is about grouping pixels with different semantics, e.g., category or instance membership, where each choice of semantics defines a task. While only the semantics of each task differ, current research focuses on designing specialized architectures for each task. We present Masked-attention Mask Transformer (Mask2Former), a new architecture capable of addressing any image segmentation task (panoptic, instance or semantic). Its key components include masked attention, which extracts localized features by constraining cross-attention within predicted mask regions. In addition to reducing the research effort by at least three times, it outperforms the best specialized architectures by a significant margin on four popular datasets. Most notably, Mask2Former sets a new state-of-the-art for panoptic segmentation (57.8 PQ on COCO), instance segmentation (50.1 AP on COCO) and semantic segmentation (57.7 mIoU on ADE20K).

Facial image manipulation has achieved great progress in recent years. However, previous methods either operate on a predefined set of face attributes or leave users little freedom to interactively manipulate images. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a novel framework termed MaskGAN, enabling diverse and interactive face manipulation. Our key insight is that semantic masks serve as a suitable intermediate representation for flexible face manipulation with fidelity preservation. MaskGAN has two main components: 1) Dense Mapping Network (DMN) and 2) Editing Behavior Simulated Training (EBST). Specifically, DMN learns style mapping between a free-form user modified mask and a target image, enabling diverse generation results. EBST models the user editing behavior on the source mask, making the overall framework more robust to various manipulated inputs. Specifically, it introduces dual-editing consistency as the auxiliary supervision signal. To facilitate extensive studies, we construct a large-scale high-resolution face dataset with fine-grained mask annotations named CelebAMask-HQ. MaskGAN is comprehensively evaluated on two challenging tasks: attribute transfer and style copy, demonstrating superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods. The code, models, and dataset are available at https://github.com/switchablenorms/CelebAMask-HQ.

We introduce MAGNeT, a masked generative sequence modeling method that operates directly over several streams of audio tokens. Unlike prior work, MAGNeT is comprised of a single-stage, non-autoregressive transformer. During training, we predict spans of masked tokens obtained from a masking scheduler, while during inference we gradually construct the output sequence using several decoding steps. To further enhance the quality of the generated audio, we introduce a novel rescoring method in which, we leverage an external pre-trained model to rescore and rank predictions from MAGNeT, which will be then used for later decoding steps. Lastly, we explore a hybrid version of MAGNeT, in which we fuse between autoregressive and non-autoregressive models to generate the first few seconds in an autoregressive manner while the rest of the sequence is being decoded in parallel. We demonstrate the efficiency of MAGNeT for the task of text-to-music and text-to-audio generation and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation, considering both objective metrics and human studies. The proposed approach is comparable to the evaluated baselines, while being significantly faster (x7 faster than the autoregressive baseline). Through ablation studies and analysis, we shed light on the importance of each of the components comprising MAGNeT, together with pointing to the trade-offs between autoregressive and non-autoregressive modeling, considering latency, throughput, and generation quality. Samples are available on our demo page https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/MAGNeT.

Masked transformer models for class-conditional image generation have become a compelling alternative to diffusion models. Typically comprising two stages - an initial VQGAN model for transitioning between latent space and image space, and a subsequent Transformer model for image generation within latent space - these frameworks offer promising avenues for image synthesis. In this study, we present two primary contributions: Firstly, an empirical and systematic examination of VQGANs, leading to a modernized VQGAN. Secondly, a novel embedding-free generation network operating directly on bit tokens - a binary quantized representation of tokens with rich semantics. The first contribution furnishes a transparent, reproducible, and high-performing VQGAN model, enhancing accessibility and matching the performance of current state-of-the-art methods while revealing previously undisclosed details. The second contribution demonstrates that embedding-free image generation using bit tokens achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.52 on the ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, with a compact generator model of mere 305M parameters.

Recent advances in generative AI have significantly enhanced image and video editing, particularly in the context of text prompt control. State-of-the-art approaches predominantly rely on diffusion models to accomplish these tasks. However, the computational demands of diffusion-based methods are substantial, often necessitating large-scale paired datasets for training, and therefore challenging the deployment in practical applications. This study addresses this challenge by breaking down the text-based video editing process into two separate stages. In the first stage, we leverage an existing text-to-image diffusion model to simultaneously edit a few keyframes without additional fine-tuning. In the second stage, we introduce an efficient model called MaskINT, which is built on non-autoregressive masked generative transformers and specializes in frame interpolation between the keyframes, benefiting from structural guidance provided by intermediate frames. Our comprehensive set of experiments illustrates the efficacy and efficiency of MaskINT when compared to other diffusion-based methodologies. This research offers a practical solution for text-based video editing and showcases the potential of non-autoregressive masked generative transformers in this domain.

Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse control modalities, such as sparse target keyframes, text instructions, and scene information. While previous works have proposed physically simulated, scene-aware control models, these systems have predominantly focused on developing controllers that each specializes in a narrow set of tasks and control modalities. This work presents MaskedMimic, a novel approach that formulates physics-based character control as a general motion inpainting problem. Our key insight is to train a single unified model to synthesize motions from partial (masked) motion descriptions, such as masked keyframes, objects, text descriptions, or any combination thereof. This is achieved by leveraging motion tracking data and designing a scalable training method that can effectively utilize diverse motion descriptions to produce coherent animations. Through this process, our approach learns a physics-based controller that provides an intuitive control interface without requiring tedious reward engineering for all behaviors of interest. The resulting controller supports a wide range of control modalities and enables seamless transitions between disparate tasks. By unifying character control through motion inpainting, MaskedMimic creates versatile virtual characters. These characters can dynamically adapt to complex scenes and compose diverse motions on demand, enabling more interactive and immersive experiences.

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation leverages visual-only video features to render plausible sounds that match the scene. Importantly, the generated sound onsets should match the visual actions that are aligned with them, otherwise unnatural synchronization artifacts arise. Recent works have explored the progression of conditioning sound generators on still images and then video features, focusing on quality and semantic matching while ignoring synchronization, or by sacrificing some amount of quality to focus on improving synchronization only. In this work, we propose a V2A generative model, named MaskVAT, that interconnects a full-band high-quality general audio codec with a sequence-to-sequence masked generative model. This combination allows modeling both high audio quality, semantic matching, and temporal synchronicity at the same time. Our results show that, by combining a high-quality codec with the proper pre-trained audio-visual features and a sequence-to-sequence parallel structure, we are able to yield highly synchronized results on one hand, whilst being competitive with the state of the art of non-codec generative audio models. Sample videos and generated audios are available at https://maskvat.github.io .

Masked (or absorbing) diffusion is actively explored as an alternative to autoregressive models for generative modeling of discrete data. However, existing work in this area has been hindered by unnecessarily complex model formulations and unclear relationships between different perspectives, leading to suboptimal parameterization, training objectives, and ad hoc adjustments to counteract these issues. In this work, we aim to provide a simple and general framework that unlocks the full potential of masked diffusion models. We show that the continuous-time variational objective of masked diffusion models is a simple weighted integral of cross-entropy losses. Our framework also enables training generalized masked diffusion models with state-dependent masking schedules. When evaluated by perplexity, our models trained on OpenWebText surpass prior diffusion language models at GPT-2 scale and demonstrate superior performance on 4 out of 5 zero-shot language modeling tasks. Furthermore, our models vastly outperform previous discrete diffusion models on pixel-level image modeling, achieving 2.78~(CIFAR-10) and 3.42 (ImageNet 64times64) bits per dimension that are comparable or better than autoregressive models of similar sizes.

Adversarial examples provoke weak reliability and potential security issues in deep neural networks. Although adversarial training has been widely studied to improve adversarial robustness, it works in an over-parameterized regime and requires high computations and large memory budgets. To bridge adversarial robustness and model compression, we propose a novel adversarial pruning method, Masking Adversarial Damage (MAD) that employs second-order information of adversarial loss. By using it, we can accurately estimate adversarial saliency for model parameters and determine which parameters can be pruned without weakening adversarial robustness. Furthermore, we reveal that model parameters of initial layer are highly sensitive to the adversarial examples and show that compressed feature representation retains semantic information for the target objects. Through extensive experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that MAD effectively prunes adversarially trained networks without loosing adversarial robustness and shows better performance than previous adversarial pruning methods.

Masked AutoEncoders (MAE) have emerged as a robust self-supervised framework, offering remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. To increase the difficulty of the pretext task and learn richer visual representations, existing works have focused on replacing standard random masking with more sophisticated strategies, such as adversarial-guided and teacher-guided masking. However, these strategies depend on the input data thus commonly increasing the model complexity and requiring additional calculations to generate the mask patterns. This raises the question: Can we enhance MAE performance beyond random masking without relying on input data or incurring additional computational costs? In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective data-independent method, termed ColorMAE, which generates different binary mask patterns by filtering random noise. Drawing inspiration from color noise in image processing, we explore four types of filters to yield mask patterns with different spatial and semantic priors. ColorMAE requires no additional learnable parameters or computational overhead in the network, yet it significantly enhances the learned representations. We provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation, demonstrating our strategy's superiority in downstream tasks compared to random masking. Notably, we report an improvement of 2.72 in mIoU in semantic segmentation tasks relative to baseline MAE implementations.

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have proven to be effective for second-pass rescoring in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this work, we propose Masked Audio Text Encoder (MATE), a multi-modal masked language model rescorer which incorporates acoustic representations into the input space of MLM. We adopt contrastive learning for effectively aligning the modalities by learning shared representations. We show that using a multi-modal rescorer is beneficial for domain generalization of the ASR system when target domain data is unavailable. MATE reduces word error rate (WER) by 4%-16% on in-domain, and 3%-7% on out-of-domain datasets, over the text-only baseline. Additionally, with very limited amount of training data (0.8 hours), MATE achieves a WER reduction of 8%-23% over the first-pass baseline.

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sampling, although at a high cost. Conversely, we develop a method that avoids external resources, relying instead on introducing perturbations to the input. Our training approach randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought, a technique we found to be particularly effective for reasoning tasks. When applied to fine-tuning with GSM8K, this method achieved a 5% improvement in accuracy over standard supervised fine-tuning with a few codes modified and no additional labeling effort. Furthermore, it is complementary to existing methods. When integrated with related data augmentation methods, it leads to an average improvement of 3% improvement in GSM8K accuracy and 1% improvement in MATH accuracy across five datasets of various quality and size, as well as two base models. We further investigate the mechanisms behind this improvement through case studies and quantitative analysis, suggesting that our approach may provide superior support for the model in capturing long-distance dependencies, especially those related to questions. This enhancement could deepen understanding of premises in questions and prior steps. Our code is available at Github.

Self-supervised pretraining (SSP) has emerged as a popular technique in machine learning, enabling the extraction of meaningful feature representations without labelled data. In the realm of computer vision, pretrained vision transformers (ViTs) have played a pivotal role in advancing transfer learning. Nonetheless, the escalating cost of finetuning these large models has posed a challenge due to the explosion of model size. This study endeavours to evaluate the effectiveness of pure self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques in computer vision tasks, obviating the need for finetuning, with the intention of emulating human-like capabilities in generalisation and recognition of unseen objects. To this end, we propose an evaluation protocol for zero-shot segmentation based on a prompting patch. Given a point on the target object as a prompt, the algorithm calculates the similarity map between the selected patch and other patches, upon that, a simple thresholding is applied to segment the target. Another evaluation is intra-object and inter-object similarity to gauge discriminatory ability of SSP ViTs. Insights from zero-shot segmentation from prompting and discriminatory abilities of SSP led to the design of a simple SSP approach, termed MMC. This approaches combines Masked image modelling for encouraging similarity of local features, Momentum based self-distillation for transferring semantics from global to local features, and global Contrast for promoting semantics of global features, to enhance discriminative representations of SSP ViTs. Consequently, our proposed method significantly reduces the overlap of intra-object and inter-object similarities, thereby facilitating effective object segmentation within an image. Our experiments reveal that MMC delivers top-tier results in zero-shot semantic segmentation across various datasets.

We introduce Masked Trajectory Models (MTM) as a generic abstraction for sequential decision making. MTM takes a trajectory, such as a state-action sequence, and aims to reconstruct the trajectory conditioned on random subsets of the same trajectory. By training with a highly randomized masking pattern, MTM learns versatile networks that can take on different roles or capabilities, by simply choosing appropriate masks at inference time. For example, the same MTM network can be used as a forward dynamics model, inverse dynamics model, or even an offline RL agent. Through extensive experiments in several continuous control tasks, we show that the same MTM network -- i.e. same weights -- can match or outperform specialized networks trained for the aforementioned capabilities. Additionally, we find that state representations learned by MTM can significantly accelerate the learning speed of traditional RL algorithms. Finally, in offline RL benchmarks, we find that MTM is competitive with specialized offline RL algorithms, despite MTM being a generic self-supervised learning method without any explicit RL components. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/mtm

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been one of the most prominent approaches for pretraining bidirectional text encoders due to its simplicity and effectiveness. One notable concern about MLM is that the special [MASK] symbol causes a discrepancy between pretraining data and downstream data as it is present only in pretraining but not in fine-tuning. In this work, we offer a new perspective on the consequence of such a discrepancy: We demonstrate empirically and theoretically that MLM pretraining allocates some model dimensions exclusively for representing [MASK] tokens, resulting in a representation deficiency for real tokens and limiting the pretrained model's expressiveness when it is adapted to downstream data without [MASK] tokens. Motivated by the identified issue, we propose MAE-LM, which pretrains the Masked Autoencoder architecture with MLM where [MASK] tokens are excluded from the encoder. Empirically, we show that MAE-LM improves the utilization of model dimensions for real token representations, and MAE-LM consistently outperforms MLM-pretrained models across different pretraining settings and model sizes when fine-tuned on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks.

Masked image modeling, an emerging self-supervised pre-training method, has shown impressive success across numerous downstream vision tasks with Vision transformers. Its underlying idea is simple: a portion of the input image is masked out and then reconstructed via a pre-text task. However, the working principle behind MIM is not well explained, and previous studies insist that MIM primarily works for the Transformer family but is incompatible with CNNs. In this work, we observe that MIM essentially teaches the model to learn better middle-order interactions among patches for more generalized feature extraction. We then propose an Architecture-Agnostic Masked Image Modeling framework (A^2MIM), which is compatible with both Transformers and CNNs in a unified way. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that A^2MIM learns better representations without explicit design and endows the backbone model with the stronger capability to transfer to various downstream tasks.

We find Mask2Former also achieves state-of-the-art performance on video instance segmentation without modifying the architecture, the loss or even the training pipeline. In this report, we show universal image segmentation architectures trivially generalize to video segmentation by directly predicting 3D segmentation volumes. Specifically, Mask2Former sets a new state-of-the-art of 60.4 AP on YouTubeVIS-2019 and 52.6 AP on YouTubeVIS-2021. We believe Mask2Former is also capable of handling video semantic and panoptic segmentation, given its versatility in image segmentation. We hope this will make state-of-the-art video segmentation research more accessible and bring more attention to designing universal image and video segmentation architectures.

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series of NLP tasks show that our masking scheme yields performance comparable to finetuning, yet has a much smaller memory footprint when several tasks need to be inferred simultaneously. Through intrinsic evaluations, we show that representations computed by masked language models encode information necessary for solving downstream tasks. Analyzing the loss landscape, we show that masking and finetuning produce models that reside in minima that can be connected by a line segment with nearly constant test accuracy. This confirms that masking can be utilized as an efficient alternative to finetuning.

Image generation models have encountered challenges related to scalability and quadratic complexity, primarily due to the reliance on Transformer-based backbones. In this study, we introduce MaskMamba, a novel hybrid model that combines Mamba and Transformer architectures, utilizing Masked Image Modeling for non-autoregressive image synthesis. We meticulously redesign the bidirectional Mamba architecture by implementing two key modifications: (1) replacing causal convolutions with standard convolutions to better capture global context, and (2) utilizing concatenation instead of multiplication, which significantly boosts performance while accelerating inference speed. Additionally, we explore various hybrid schemes of MaskMamba, including both serial and grouped parallel arrangements. Furthermore, we incorporate an in-context condition that allows our model to perform both class-to-image and text-to-image generation tasks. Our MaskMamba outperforms Mamba-based and Transformer-based models in generation quality. Notably, it achieves a remarkable 54.44% improvement in inference speed at a resolution of 2048times 2048 over Transformer.

Attention mechanisms that confer selective focus on a strict subset of input elements are nearly ubiquitous in language models today. We posit there to be downside to the use of attention: most information present in the input is necessarily lost. In support of this idea we observe poor input representation accuracy in transformers, but find more accurate representation in what we term masked mixers which replace self-attention with masked convolutions. Applied to TinyStories the masked mixer learns causal language tasks more efficiently than early transformer implementations and somewhat less efficiently than optimized, current implementations. The most efficient learning algorithm observed for this dataset is a transformer-masked mixer hybrid, suggesting that these models learn in an orthogonal manner. We hypothesized that the information loss exhibited by transformers would be much more detrimental to retrieval than generation, and to test this we introduce an efficient training approach for retrieval models based on existing generative model embeddings. With this method, embeddings from masked mixers are found to result in far better summary-to-story retrieval compared to embeddings from transformers.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has emerged as a promising method for deriving visual representations from unlabeled image data by predicting missing pixels from masked portions of images. It excels in region-aware learning and provides strong initializations for various tasks, but struggles to capture high-level semantics without further supervised fine-tuning, likely due to the low-level nature of its pixel reconstruction objective. A promising yet unrealized framework is learning representations through masked reconstruction in latent space, combining the locality of MIM with the high-level targets. However, this approach poses significant training challenges as the reconstruction targets are learned in conjunction with the model, potentially leading to trivial or suboptimal solutions.Our study is among the first to thoroughly analyze and address the challenges of such framework, which we refer to as Latent MIM. Through a series of carefully designed experiments and extensive analysis, we identify the source of these challenges, including representation collapsing for joint online/target optimization, learning objectives, the high region correlation in latent space and decoding conditioning. By sequentially addressing these issues, we demonstrate that Latent MIM can indeed learn high-level representations while retaining the benefits of MIM models.

Compared with visual signals, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) placed on human limbs can capture accurate motion signals while being robust to lighting variation and occlusion. While these characteristics are intuitively valuable to help egocentric action recognition, the potential of IMUs remains under-explored. In this work, we present a novel method for action recognition that integrates motion data from body-worn IMUs with egocentric video. Due to the scarcity of labeled multimodal data, we design an MAE-based self-supervised pretraining method, obtaining strong multi-modal representations via modeling the natural correlation between visual and motion signals. To model the complex relation of multiple IMU devices placed across the body, we exploit the collaborative dynamics in multiple IMU devices and propose to embed the relative motion features of human joints into a graph structure. Experiments show our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets. The effectiveness of our MAE-based pretraining and graph-based IMU modeling are further validated by experiments in more challenging scenarios, including partially missing IMU devices and video quality corruption, promoting more flexible usages in the real world.

Virtual Try-On (VTON) is a highly active line of research, with increasing demand. It aims to replace a piece of garment in an image with one from another, while preserving person and garment characteristics as well as image fidelity. Current literature takes a supervised approach for the task, impairing generalization and imposing heavy computation. In this paper, we present a novel zero-shot training-free method for inpainting a clothing garment by reference. Our approach employs the prior of a diffusion model with no additional training, fully leveraging its native generalization capabilities. The method employs extended attention to transfer image information from reference to target images, overcoming two significant challenges. We first initially warp the reference garment over the target human using deep features, alleviating "texture sticking". We then leverage the extended attention mechanism with careful masking, eliminating leakage of reference background and unwanted influence. Through a user study, qualitative, and quantitative comparison to state-of-the-art approaches, we demonstrate superior image quality and garment preservation compared unseen clothing pieces or human figures.

Modern learning frameworks often train deep neural networks with massive amounts of unlabeled data to learn representations by solving simple pretext tasks, then use the representations as foundations for downstream tasks. These networks are empirically designed; as such, they are usually not interpretable, their representations are not structured, and their designs are potentially redundant. White-box deep networks, in which each layer explicitly identifies and transforms structures in the data, present a promising alternative. However, existing white-box architectures have only been shown to work at scale in supervised settings with labeled data, such as classification. In this work, we provide the first instantiation of the white-box design paradigm that can be applied to large-scale unsupervised representation learning. We do this by exploiting a fundamental connection between diffusion, compression, and (masked) completion, deriving a deep transformer-like masked autoencoder architecture, called CRATE-MAE, in which the role of each layer is mathematically fully interpretable: they transform the data distribution to and from a structured representation. Extensive empirical evaluations confirm our analytical insights. CRATE-MAE demonstrates highly promising performance on large-scale imagery datasets while using only ~30% of the parameters compared to the standard masked autoencoder with the same model configuration. The representations learned by CRATE-MAE have explicit structure and also contain semantic meaning. Code is available at https://github.com/Ma-Lab-Berkeley/CRATE .

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) arises as a promising option for Vision Transformers among various self-supervised learning (SSL) methods. The essence of MIM lies in token-wise masked patch predictions, with targets patchified from images; or generated by pre-trained tokenizers or models. We argue targets from the pre-trained models usually exhibit spatial inconsistency, which makes it excessively challenging for the model to follow to learn more discriminative representations. To mitigate the issue, we introduce a novel self-supervision signal based on Dynamic Token Morphing (DTM), which dynamically aggregates contextually related tokens. DTM can be generally applied to various SSL frameworks, yet we propose a simple MIM that employs DTM to effectively improve the performance barely introducing extra training costs. Our experiments on ImageNet-1K and ADE20K evidently demonstrate the superiority of our methods. Furthermore, the comparative evaluation of iNaturalist and Fine-grained Visual Classification datasets further validates the transferability of our method on various downstream tasks. Our code will be released publicly.

In the post-pandemic era, wearing face masks has posed great challenge to the ordinary face recognition. In the previous study, researchers has applied pretrained VGG16, and ResNet50 to extract features on the elaborate curated existing masked face recognition (MFR) datasets, RMFRD and SMFRD. To make the model more adaptable to the real world situation where the sample size is smaller and the camera environment has greater changes, we created a more challenging masked face dataset ourselves, by selecting 50 identities with 1702 images from Labelled Faces in the Wild (LFW) Dataset, and simulated face masks through key point detection. The another part of our study is to solve the masked face recognition problem, and we chose models by referring to the former state of the art results, instead of directly using pretrained models, we fine tuned the model on our new dataset and use the last linear layer to do the classification directly. Furthermore, we proposed using data augmentation strategy to further increase the test accuracy, and fine tuned a new networks beyond the former study, one of the most SOTA networks, Inception ResNet v1. The best test accuracy on 50 identity MFR has achieved 95%.

Masked point modeling has become a promising scheme of self-supervised pre-training for point clouds. Existing methods reconstruct either the original points or related features as the objective of pre-training. However, considering the diversity of downstream tasks, it is necessary for the model to have both low- and high-level representation modeling capabilities to capture geometric details and semantic contexts during pre-training. To this end, M^3CS is proposed to enable the model with the above abilities. Specifically, with masked point cloud as input, M^3CS introduces two decoders to predict masked representations and the original points simultaneously. While an extra decoder doubles parameters for the decoding process and may lead to overfitting, we propose siamese decoders to keep the amount of learnable parameters unchanged. Further, we propose an online codebook projecting continuous tokens into discrete ones before reconstructing masked points. In such way, we can enforce the decoder to take effect through the combinations of tokens rather than remembering each token. Comprehensive experiments show that M^3CS achieves superior performance at both classification and segmentation tasks, outperforming existing methods.

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to sequentially learn new classes while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge. We propose to use Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) as efficient learners for CIL. MAEs were originally designed to learn useful representations through reconstructive unsupervised learning, and they can be easily integrated with a supervised loss for classification. Moreover, MAEs can reliably reconstruct original input images from randomly selected patches, which we use to store exemplars from past tasks more efficiently for CIL. We also propose a bilateral MAE framework to learn from image-level and embedding-level fusion, which produces better-quality reconstructed images and more stable representations. Our experiments confirm that our approach performs better than the state-of-the-art on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, and ImageNet-Full. The code is available at https://github.com/scok30/MAE-CIL .

Masked autoencoding has shown excellent performance on self-supervised video representation learning. Temporal redundancy has led to a high masking ratio and customized masking strategy in VideoMAE. In this paper, we aim to further improve the performance of video masked autoencoding by introducing a motion guided masking strategy. Our key insight is that motion is a general and unique prior in video, which should be taken into account during masked pre-training. Our motion guided masking explicitly incorporates motion information to build temporal consistent masking volume. Based on this masking volume, we can track the unmasked tokens in time and sample a set of temporal consistent cubes from videos. These temporal aligned unmasked tokens will further relieve the information leakage issue in time and encourage the MGMAE to learn more useful structure information. We implement our MGMAE with an online efficient optical flow estimator and backward masking map warping strategy. We perform experiments on the datasets of Something-Something V2 and Kinetics-400, demonstrating the superior performance of our MGMAE to the original VideoMAE. In addition, we provide the visualization analysis to illustrate that our MGMAE can sample temporal consistent cubes in a motion-adaptive manner for more effective video pre-training.

Recently, the community has made tremendous progress in developing effective methods for point cloud video understanding that learn from massive amounts of labeled data. However, annotating point cloud videos is usually notoriously expensive. Moreover, training via one or only a few traditional tasks (e.g., classification) may be insufficient to learn subtle details of the spatio-temporal structure existing in point cloud videos. In this paper, we propose a Masked Spatio-Temporal Structure Prediction (MaST-Pre) method to capture the structure of point cloud videos without human annotations. MaST-Pre is based on spatio-temporal point-tube masking and consists of two self-supervised learning tasks. First, by reconstructing masked point tubes, our method is able to capture the appearance information of point cloud videos. Second, to learn motion, we propose a temporal cardinality difference prediction task that estimates the change in the number of points within a point tube. In this way, MaST-Pre is forced to model the spatial and temporal structure in point cloud videos. Extensive experiments on MSRAction-3D, NTU-RGBD, NvGesture, and SHREC'17 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In 3D human action recognition, limited supervised data makes it challenging to fully tap into the modeling potential of powerful networks such as transformers. As a result, researchers have been actively investigating effective self-supervised pre-training strategies. In this work, we show that instead of following the prevalent pretext task to perform masked self-component reconstruction in human joints, explicit contextual motion modeling is key to the success of learning effective feature representation for 3D action recognition. Formally, we propose the Masked Motion Prediction (MAMP) framework. To be specific, the proposed MAMP takes as input the masked spatio-temporal skeleton sequence and predicts the corresponding temporal motion of the masked human joints. Considering the high temporal redundancy of the skeleton sequence, in our MAMP, the motion information also acts as an empirical semantic richness prior that guide the masking process, promoting better attention to semantically rich temporal regions. Extensive experiments on NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD datasets show that the proposed MAMP pre-training substantially improves the performance of the adopted vanilla transformer, achieving state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles. The source code of our MAMP is available at https://github.com/maoyunyao/MAMP.

Masked image modelling (MIM) is a powerful self-supervised representation learning paradigm, whose potential has not been widely demonstrated in medical image analysis. In this work, we show the capacity of MIM to capture rich semantic representations of Haemotoxylin & Eosin (H&E)-stained images at the nuclear level. Inspired by Bidirectional Encoder representation from Image Transformers (BEiT), we split the images into smaller patches and generate corresponding discrete visual tokens. In addition to the regular grid-based patches, typically used in visual Transformers, we introduce patches of individual cell nuclei. We propose positional encoding of the irregular distribution of these structures within an image. We pre-train the model in a self-supervised manner on H&E-stained whole-slide images of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, where cell nuclei have been segmented. The pre-training objective is to recover the original discrete visual tokens of the masked image on the one hand, and to reconstruct the visual tokens of the masked object instances on the other. Coupling these two pre-training tasks allows us to build powerful, context-aware representations of nuclei. Our model generalizes well and can be fine-tuned on downstream classification tasks, achieving improved cell classification accuracy on PanNuke dataset by more than 5% compared to current instance segmentation methods.

Masked autoencoder (MAE) has attracted unprecedented attention and achieves remarkable performance in many vision tasks. It reconstructs random masked image patches (known as proxy task) during pretraining and learns meaningful semantic representations that can be transferred to downstream tasks. However, MAE has not been thoroughly explored in ultrasound imaging. In this work, we investigate the potential of MAE for ultrasound image recognition. Motivated by the unique property of ultrasound imaging in high noise-to-signal ratio, we propose a novel deblurring MAE approach that incorporates deblurring into the proxy task during pretraining. The addition of deblurring facilitates the pretraining to better recover the subtle details presented in the ultrasound images, thus improving the performance of the downstream classification task. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our deblurring MAE, achieving state-of-the-art performance in ultrasound image classification. Overall, our work highlights the potential of MAE for ultrasound image recognition and presents a novel approach that incorporates deblurring to further improve its effectiveness.

In this work, we propose a Multi-Window Masked Autoencoder (MW-MAE) fitted with a novel Multi-Window Multi-Head Attention (MW-MHA) module that facilitates the modelling of local-global interactions in every decoder transformer block through attention heads of several distinct local and global windows. Empirical results on ten downstream audio tasks show that MW-MAEs consistently outperform standard MAEs in overall performance and learn better general-purpose audio representations, along with demonstrating considerably better scaling characteristics. Investigating attention distances and entropies reveals that MW-MAE encoders learn heads with broader local and global attention. Analyzing attention head feature representations through Projection Weighted Canonical Correlation Analysis (PWCCA) shows that attention heads with the same window sizes across the decoder layers of the MW-MAE learn correlated feature representations which enables each block to independently capture local and global information, leading to a decoupled decoder feature hierarchy. Code for feature extraction and downstream experiments along with pre-trained models will be released publically.

Masked language models (MLM) do not explicitly define a distribution over language, i.e., they are not language models per se. However, recent work has implicitly treated them as such for the purposes of generation and scoring. This paper studies methods for deriving explicit joint distributions from MLMs, focusing on distributions over two tokens, which makes it possible to calculate exact distributional properties. We find that an approach based on identifying joints whose conditionals are closest to those of the MLM works well and outperforms existing Markov random field-based approaches. We further find that this derived model's conditionals can even occasionally outperform the original MLM's conditionals.

Bayesian approaches for learning deep neural networks (BNN) have been received much attention and successfully applied to various applications. Particularly, BNNs have the merit of having better generalization ability as well as better uncertainty quantification. For the success of BNN, search an appropriate architecture of the neural networks is an important task, and various algorithms to find good sparse neural networks have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new node-sparse BNN model which has good theoretical properties and is computationally feasible. We prove that the posterior concentration rate to the true model is near minimax optimal and adaptive to the smoothness of the true model. In particular the adaptiveness is the first of its kind for node-sparse BNNs. In addition, we develop a novel MCMC algorithm which makes the Bayesian inference of the node-sparse BNN model feasible in practice.

Masked autoencoders (MAE) have recently been introduced to 3D self-supervised pretraining for point clouds due to their great success in NLP and computer vision. Unlike MAEs used in the image domain, where the pretext task is to restore features at the masked pixels, such as colors, the existing 3D MAE works reconstruct the missing geometry only, i.e, the location of the masked points. In contrast to previous studies, we advocate that point location recovery is inessential and restoring intrinsic point features is much superior. To this end, we propose to ignore point position reconstruction and recover high-order features at masked points including surface normals and surface variations, through a novel attention-based decoder which is independent of the encoder design. We validate the effectiveness of our pretext task and decoder design using different encoder structures for 3D training and demonstrate the advantages of our pretrained networks on various point cloud analysis tasks.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has attracted much research attention due to its promising potential for learning scalable visual representations. In typical approaches, models usually focus on predicting specific contents of masked patches, and their performances are highly related to pre-defined mask strategies. Intuitively, this procedure can be considered as training a student (the model) on solving given problems (predict masked patches). However, we argue that the model should not only focus on solving given problems, but also stand in the shoes of a teacher to produce a more challenging problem by itself. To this end, we propose Hard Patches Mining (HPM), a brand-new framework for MIM pre-training. We observe that the reconstruction loss can naturally be the metric of the difficulty of the pre-training task. Therefore, we introduce an auxiliary loss predictor, predicting patch-wise losses first and deciding where to mask next. It adopts a relative relationship learning strategy to prevent overfitting to exact reconstruction loss values. Experiments under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of HPM in constructing masked images. Furthermore, we empirically find that solely introducing the loss prediction objective leads to powerful representations, verifying the efficacy of the ability to be aware of where is hard to reconstruct.

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have been popular paradigms for large-scale vision representation pre-training. However, MAE solely reconstructs the low-level RGB signals after the decoder and lacks supervision upon high-level semantics for the encoder, thus suffering from sub-optimal learned representations and long pre-training epochs. To alleviate this, previous methods simply replace the pixel reconstruction targets of 75% masked tokens by encoded features from pre-trained image-image (DINO) or image-language (CLIP) contrastive learning. Different from those efforts, we propose to Mimic before Reconstruct for Masked Autoencoders, named as MR-MAE, which jointly learns high-level and low-level representations without interference during pre-training. For high-level semantics, MR-MAE employs a mimic loss over 25% visible tokens from the encoder to capture the pre-trained patterns encoded in CLIP and DINO. For low-level structures, we inherit the reconstruction loss in MAE to predict RGB pixel values for 75% masked tokens after the decoder. As MR-MAE applies high-level and low-level targets respectively at different partitions, the learning conflicts between them can be naturally overcome and contribute to superior visual representations for various downstream tasks. On ImageNet-1K, the MR-MAE base pre-trained for only 400 epochs achieves 85.8% top-1 accuracy after fine-tuning, surpassing the 1600-epoch MAE base by +2.2% and the previous state-of-the-art BEiT V2 base by +0.3%. Code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Alpha-VL/ConvMAE.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) achieves outstanding success in self-supervised representation learning. Unfortunately, MIM models typically have huge computational burden and slow learning process, which is an inevitable obstacle for their industrial applications. Although the lower layers play the key role in MIM, existing MIM models conduct reconstruction task only at the top layer of encoder. The lower layers are not explicitly guided and the interaction among their patches is only used for calculating new activations. Considering the reconstruction task requires non-trivial inter-patch interactions to reason target signals, we apply it to multiple local layers including lower and upper layers. Further, since the multiple layers expect to learn the information of different scales, we design local multi-scale reconstruction, where the lower and upper layers reconstruct fine-scale and coarse-scale supervision signals respectively. This design not only accelerates the representation learning process by explicitly guiding multiple layers, but also facilitates multi-scale semantical understanding to the input. Extensive experiments show that with significantly less pre-training burden, our model achieves comparable or better performance on classification, detection and segmentation tasks than existing MIM models.

Current popular backbones in computer vision, such as Vision Transformers (ViT) and ResNets are trained to perceive the world from 2D images. However, to more effectively understand 3D structural priors in 2D backbones, we propose Mask3D to leverage existing large-scale RGB-D data in a self-supervised pre-training to embed these 3D priors into 2D learned feature representations. In contrast to traditional 3D contrastive learning paradigms requiring 3D reconstructions or multi-view correspondences, our approach is simple: we formulate a pre-text reconstruction task by masking RGB and depth patches in individual RGB-D frames. We demonstrate the Mask3D is particularly effective in embedding 3D priors into the powerful 2D ViT backbone, enabling improved representation learning for various scene understanding tasks, such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and object detection. Experiments show that Mask3D notably outperforms existing self-supervised 3D pre-training approaches on ScanNet, NYUv2, and Cityscapes image understanding tasks, with an improvement of +6.5% mIoU against the state-of-the-art Pri3D on ScanNet image semantic segmentation.

Recent conditional image generation methods produce images of remarkable diversity, fidelity and realism. However, the majority of these methods allow conditioning only on labels or text prompts, which limits their level of control over the generation result. In this paper, we introduce MaskSketch, an image generation method that allows spatial conditioning of the generation result using a guiding sketch as an extra conditioning signal during sampling. MaskSketch utilizes a pre-trained masked generative transformer, requiring no model training or paired supervision, and works with input sketches of different levels of abstraction. We show that intermediate self-attention maps of a masked generative transformer encode important structural information of the input image, such as scene layout and object shape, and we propose a novel sampling method based on this observation to enable structure-guided generation. Our results show that MaskSketch achieves high image realism and fidelity to the guiding structure. Evaluated on standard benchmark datasets, MaskSketch outperforms state-of-the-art methods for sketch-to-image translation, as well as unpaired image-to-image translation approaches.

We propose MaskingDepth, a novel semi-supervised learning framework for monocular depth estimation to mitigate the reliance on large ground-truth depth quantities. MaskingDepth is designed to enforce consistency between the strongly-augmented unlabeled data and the pseudo-labels derived from weakly-augmented unlabeled data, which enables learning depth without supervision. In this framework, a novel data augmentation is proposed to take the advantage of a naive masking strategy as an augmentation, while avoiding its scale ambiguity problem between depths from weakly- and strongly-augmented branches and risk of missing small-scale instances. To only retain high-confident depth predictions from the weakly-augmented branch as pseudo-labels, we also present an uncertainty estimation technique, which is used to define robust consistency regularization. Experiments on KITTI and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of each component, its robustness to the use of fewer depth-annotated images, and superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods for monocular depth estimation. Furthermore, we show our method can be easily extended to domain adaptation task. Our code is available at https://github.com/KU-CVLAB/MaskingDepth.

We present Fast Language-Image Pre-training (FLIP), a simple and more efficient method for training CLIP. Our method randomly masks out and removes a large portion of image patches during training. Masking allows us to learn from more image-text pairs given the same wall-clock time and contrast more samples per iteration with similar memory footprint. It leads to a favorable trade-off between accuracy and training time. In our experiments on 400 million image-text pairs, FLIP improves both accuracy and speed over the no-masking baseline. On a large diversity of downstream tasks, FLIP dominantly outperforms the CLIP counterparts trained on the same data. Facilitated by the speedup, we explore the scaling behavior of increasing the model size, data size, or training length, and report encouraging results and comparisons. We hope that our work will foster future research on scaling vision-language learning.

Masked Video Autoencoder (MVA) approaches have demonstrated their potential by significantly outperforming previous video representation learning methods. However, they waste an excessive amount of computations and memory in predicting uninformative tokens/frames due to random masking strategies. (e.g., over 16 nodes with 128 NVIDIA A100 GPUs). To resolve this issue, we exploit the unequal information density among the patches in videos and propose EVEREST, a surprisingly efficient MVA approach for video representation learning that finds tokens containing rich motion features and discards uninformative ones during both pre-training and fine-tuning. We further present an information-intensive frame selection strategy that allows the model to focus on informative and causal frames with minimal redundancy. Our method significantly reduces the computation and memory requirements of MVA, enabling the pre-training and fine-tuning on a single machine with 8 GPUs while achieving comparable performance to computation- and memory-heavy baselines on multiple benchmarks and the uncurated Ego4D dataset. We hope that our work contributes to reducing the barrier to further research on video understanding.

Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) learn generalizable representations for image, text, audio, video, etc., by reconstructing masked input data from tokens of the visible data. Current MAE approaches for videos rely on random patch, tube, or frame-based masking strategies to select these tokens. This paper proposes AdaMAE, an adaptive masking strategy for MAEs that is end-to-end trainable. Our adaptive masking strategy samples visible tokens based on the semantic context using an auxiliary sampling network. This network estimates a categorical distribution over spacetime-patch tokens. The tokens that increase the expected reconstruction error are rewarded and selected as visible tokens, motivated by the policy gradient algorithm in reinforcement learning. We show that AdaMAE samples more tokens from the high spatiotemporal information regions, thereby allowing us to mask 95% of tokens, resulting in lower memory requirements and faster pre-training. We conduct ablation studies on the Something-Something v2 (SSv2) dataset to demonstrate the efficacy of our adaptive sampling approach and report state-of-the-art results of 70.0% and 81.7% in top-1 accuracy on SSv2 and Kinetics-400 action classification datasets with a ViT-Base backbone and 800 pre-training epochs.

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have been prevailing paradigms for large-scale vision representation pre-training. By reconstructing masked image patches from a small portion of visible image regions, MAE forces the model to infer semantic correlation within an image. Recently, some approaches apply semantic-rich teacher models to extract image features as the reconstruction target, leading to better performance. However, unlike the low-level features such as pixel values, we argue the features extracted by powerful teacher models already encode rich semantic correlation across regions in an intact image.This raises one question: is reconstruction necessary in Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with a teacher model? In this paper, we propose an efficient MIM paradigm named MaskAlign. MaskAlign simply learns the consistency of visible patch features extracted by the student model and intact image features extracted by the teacher model. To further advance the performance and tackle the problem of input inconsistency between the student and teacher model, we propose a Dynamic Alignment (DA) module to apply learnable alignment. Our experimental results demonstrate that masked modeling does not lose effectiveness even without reconstruction on masked regions. Combined with Dynamic Alignment, MaskAlign can achieve state-of-the-art performance with much higher efficiency. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/maskalign.

Masked language modeling is widely used for pretraining large language models for natural language understanding (NLU). However, random masking is suboptimal, allocating an equal masking rate for all tokens. In this paper, we propose InforMask, a new unsupervised masking strategy for training masked language models. InforMask exploits Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) to select the most informative tokens to mask. We further propose two optimizations for InforMask to improve its efficiency. With a one-off preprocessing step, InforMask outperforms random masking and previously proposed masking strategies on the factual recall benchmark LAMA and the question answering benchmark SQuAD v1 and v2.

Masked image modeling has demonstrated great potential to eliminate the label-hungry problem of training large-scale vision Transformers, achieving impressive performance on various downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a unified view of masked image modeling after revisiting existing methods. Under the unified view, we introduce a simple yet effective method, termed as MaskDistill, which reconstructs normalized semantic features from teacher models at the masked positions, conditioning on corrupted input images. Experimental results on image classification and semantic segmentation show that MaskDistill achieves comparable or superior performance than state-of-the-art methods. When using the huge vision Transformer and pretraining 300 epochs, MaskDistill obtains 88.3% fine-tuning top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k (224 size) and 58.8% semantic segmentation mIoU metric on ADE20k (512 size). The code and pretrained models will be available at https://aka.ms/unimim.

How to learn discriminative video representation from unlabeled videos is challenging but crucial for video analysis. The latest attempts seek to learn a representation model by predicting the appearance contents in the masked regions. However, simply masking and recovering appearance contents may not be sufficient to model temporal clues as the appearance contents can be easily reconstructed from a single frame. To overcome this limitation, we present Masked Motion Encoding (MME), a new pre-training paradigm that reconstructs both appearance and motion information to explore temporal clues. In MME, we focus on addressing two critical challenges to improve the representation performance: 1) how to well represent the possible long-term motion across multiple frames; and 2) how to obtain fine-grained temporal clues from sparsely sampled videos. Motivated by the fact that human is able to recognize an action by tracking objects' position changes and shape changes, we propose to reconstruct a motion trajectory that represents these two kinds of change in the masked regions. Besides, given the sparse video input, we enforce the model to reconstruct dense motion trajectories in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Pre-trained with our MME paradigm, the model is able to anticipate long-term and fine-grained motion details. Code is available at https://github.com/XinyuSun/MME.

The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Transformers has attracted significant attention due to their potential for high energy efficiency and high-performance nature. However, existing works on this topic typically rely on direct training, which can lead to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to leverage the benefits of the ANN-to-SNN conversion method to combine SNNs and Transformers, resulting in significantly improved performance over existing state-of-the-art SNN models. Furthermore, inspired by the quantal synaptic failures observed in the nervous system, which reduces the number of spikes transmitted across synapses, we introduce a novel Masked Spiking Transformer (MST) framework that incorporates a Random Spike Masking (RSM) method to prune redundant spikes and reduce energy consumption without sacrificing performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MST model achieves a significant reduction of 26.8% in power consumption when the masking ratio is 75% while maintaining the same level of performance as the unmasked model.

Self-attention is of vital importance in semantic segmentation as it enables modeling of long-range context, which translates into improved performance. We argue that it is equally important to model short-range context, especially to tackle cases where not only the regions of interest are small and ambiguous, but also when there exists an imbalance between the semantic classes. To this end, we propose Masked Supervised Learning (MaskSup), an effective single-stage learning paradigm that models both short- and long-range context, capturing the contextual relationships between pixels via random masking. Experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of MaskSup against strong baselines in both binary and multi-class segmentation tasks on three standard benchmark datasets, particularly at handling ambiguous regions and retaining better segmentation of minority classes with no added inference cost. In addition to segmenting target regions even when large portions of the input are masked, MaskSup is also generic and can be easily integrated into a variety of semantic segmentation methods. We also show that the proposed method is computationally efficient, yielding an improved performance by 10\% on the mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) while requiring 3times less learnable parameters.

Masked autoencoders have become popular training paradigms for self-supervised visual representation learning. These models randomly mask a portion of the input and reconstruct the masked portion according to the target representations. In this paper, we first show that a careful choice of the target representation is unnecessary for learning good representations, since different targets tend to derive similarly behaved models. Driven by this observation, we propose a multi-stage masked distillation pipeline and use a randomly initialized model as the teacher, enabling us to effectively train high-capacity models without any efforts to carefully design target representations. Interestingly, we further explore using teachers of larger capacity, obtaining distilled students with remarkable transferring ability. On different tasks of classification, transfer learning, object detection, and semantic segmentation, the proposed method to perform masked knowledge distillation with bootstrapped teachers (dBOT) outperforms previous self-supervised methods by nontrivial margins. We hope our findings, as well as the proposed method, could motivate people to rethink the roles of target representations in pre-training masked autoencoders.The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/liuxingbin/dbot.

Masked visual modeling (MVM) has been recently proven effective for visual pre-training. While similar reconstructive objectives on video inputs (e.g., masked frame modeling) have been explored in video-language (VidL) pre-training, previous studies fail to find a truly effective MVM strategy that can largely benefit the downstream performance. In this work, we systematically examine the potential of MVM in the context of VidL learning. Specifically, we base our study on a fully end-to-end VIdeO-LanguagE Transformer (VIOLET), where the supervision from MVM training can be backpropagated to the video pixel space. In total, eight different reconstructive targets of MVM are explored, from low-level pixel values and oriented gradients to high-level depth maps, optical flow, discrete visual tokens, and latent visual features. We conduct comprehensive experiments and provide insights into the factors leading to effective MVM training, resulting in an enhanced model VIOLETv2. Empirically, we show VIOLETv2 pre-trained with MVM objective achieves notable improvements on 13 VidL benchmarks, ranging from video question answering, video captioning, to text-to-video retrieval.

This paper studies the potential of distilling knowledge from pre-trained models, especially Masked Autoencoders. Our approach is simple: in addition to optimizing the pixel reconstruction loss on masked inputs, we minimize the distance between the intermediate feature map of the teacher model and that of the student model. This design leads to a computationally efficient knowledge distillation framework, given 1) only a small visible subset of patches is used, and 2) the (cumbersome) teacher model only needs to be partially executed, ie, forward propagate inputs through the first few layers, for obtaining intermediate feature maps. Compared to directly distilling fine-tuned models, distilling pre-trained models substantially improves downstream performance. For example, by distilling the knowledge from an MAE pre-trained ViT-L into a ViT-B, our method achieves 84.0% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, outperforming the baseline of directly distilling a fine-tuned ViT-L by 1.2%. More intriguingly, our method can robustly distill knowledge from teacher models even with extremely high masking ratios: e.g., with 95% masking ratio where merely TEN patches are visible during distillation, our ViT-B competitively attains a top-1 ImageNet accuracy of 83.6%; surprisingly, it can still secure 82.4% top-1 ImageNet accuracy by aggressively training with just FOUR visible patches (98% masking ratio). The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/DMAE.

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been widely used as the denoising objective in pre-training language models (PrLMs). Existing PrLMs commonly adopt a Random-Token Masking strategy where a fixed masking ratio is applied and different contents are masked by an equal probability throughout the entire training. However, the model may receive complicated impact from pre-training status, which changes accordingly as training time goes on. In this paper, we show that such time-invariant MLM settings on masking ratio and masked content are unlikely to deliver an optimal outcome, which motivates us to explore the influence of time-variant MLM settings. We propose two scheduled masking approaches that adaptively tune the masking ratio and masked content in different training stages, which improves the pre-training efficiency and effectiveness verified on the downstream tasks. Our work is a pioneer study on time-variant masking strategy on ratio and content and gives a better understanding of how masking ratio and masked content influence the MLM pre-training.

In this paper, we tackle an emerging computer vision task, open-vocabulary universal image segmentation, that aims to perform semantic/instance/panoptic segmentation (background semantic labeling + foreground instance segmentation) for arbitrary categories of text-based descriptions in inference time. We first build a baseline method by directly adopting pre-trained CLIP models without finetuning or distillation. We then develop MaskCLIP, a Transformer-based approach with a MaskCLIP Visual Encoder, which is an encoder-only module that seamlessly integrates mask tokens with a pre-trained ViT CLIP model for semantic/instance segmentation and class prediction. MaskCLIP learns to efficiently and effectively utilize pre-trained partial/dense CLIP features within the MaskCLIP Visual Encoder that avoids the time-consuming student-teacher training process. MaskCLIP outperforms previous methods for semantic/instance/panoptic segmentation on ADE20K and PASCAL datasets. We show qualitative illustrations for MaskCLIP with online custom categories. Project website: https://maskclip.github.io.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has demonstrated impressive results in self-supervised representation learning by recovering corrupted image patches. However, most existing studies operate on low-level image pixels, which hinders the exploitation of high-level semantics for representation models. In this work, we propose to use a semantic-rich visual tokenizer as the reconstruction target for masked prediction, providing a systematic way to promote MIM from pixel-level to semantic-level. Specifically, we propose vector-quantized knowledge distillation to train the tokenizer, which discretizes a continuous semantic space to compact codes. We then pretrain vision Transformers by predicting the original visual tokens for the masked image patches. Furthermore, we introduce a patch aggregation strategy which associates discrete image patches to enhance global semantic representation. Experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation show that BEiT v2 outperforms all compared MIM methods. On ImageNet-1K (224 size), the base-size BEiT v2 achieves 85.5% top-1 accuracy for fine-tuning and 80.1% top-1 accuracy for linear probing. The large-size BEiT v2 obtains 87.3% top-1 accuracy for ImageNet-1K (224 size) fine-tuning, and 56.7% mIoU on ADE20K for semantic segmentation. The code and pretrained models are available at https://aka.ms/beitv2.

Masked autoencoding has become a successful pretraining paradigm for Transformer models for text, images, and, recently, point clouds. Raw automotive datasets are suitable candidates for self-supervised pre-training as they generally are cheap to collect compared to annotations for tasks like 3D object detection (OD). However, the development of masked autoencoders for point clouds has focused solely on synthetic and indoor data. Consequently, existing methods have tailored their representations and models toward small and dense point clouds with homogeneous point densities. In this work, we study masked autoencoding for point clouds in an automotive setting, which are sparse and for which the point density can vary drastically among objects in the same scene. To this end, we propose Voxel-MAE, a simple masked autoencoding pre-training scheme designed for voxel representations. We pre-train the backbone of a Transformer-based 3D object detector to reconstruct masked voxels and to distinguish between empty and non-empty voxels. Our method improves the 3D OD performance by 1.75 mAP points and 1.05 NDS on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Further, we show that by pre-training with Voxel-MAE, we require only 40% of the annotated data to outperform a randomly initialized equivalent. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/voxel-mae

Vision Transformers (ViT) become widely-adopted architectures for various vision tasks. Masked auto-encoding for feature pretraining and multi-scale hybrid convolution-transformer architectures can further unleash the potentials of ViT, leading to state-of-the-art performances on image classification, detection and semantic segmentation. In this paper, our ConvMAE framework demonstrates that multi-scale hybrid convolution-transformer can learn more discriminative representations via the mask auto-encoding scheme. However, directly using the original masking strategy leads to the heavy computational cost and pretraining-finetuning discrepancy. To tackle the issue, we adopt the masked convolution to prevent information leakage in the convolution blocks. A simple block-wise masking strategy is proposed to ensure computational efficiency. We also propose to more directly supervise the multi-scale features of the encoder to boost multi-scale features. Based on our pretrained ConvMAE models, ConvMAE-Base improves ImageNet-1K finetuning accuracy by 1.4% compared with MAE-Base. On object detection, ConvMAE-Base finetuned for only 25 epochs surpasses MAE-Base fined-tuned for 100 epochs by 2.9% box AP and 2.2% mask AP respectively. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Alpha-VL/ConvMAE.

We propose Masked Siamese Networks (MSN), a self-supervised learning framework for learning image representations. Our approach matches the representation of an image view containing randomly masked patches to the representation of the original unmasked image. This self-supervised pre-training strategy is particularly scalable when applied to Vision Transformers since only the unmasked patches are processed by the network. As a result, MSNs improve the scalability of joint-embedding architectures, while producing representations of a high semantic level that perform competitively on low-shot image classification. For instance, on ImageNet-1K, with only 5,000 annotated images, our base MSN model achieves 72.4% top-1 accuracy, and with 1% of ImageNet-1K labels, we achieve 75.7% top-1 accuracy, setting a new state-of-the-art for self-supervised learning on this benchmark. Our code is publicly available.

Masked speech modeling (MSM) methods such as wav2vec2 or w2v-BERT learn representations over speech frames which are randomly masked within an utterance. While these methods improve performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, they have one major limitation. They treat all unsupervised speech samples with equal weight, which hinders learning as not all samples have relevant information to learn meaningful representations. In this work, we address this limitation. We propose ask2mask (ATM), a novel approach to focus on specific samples during MSM pre-training. ATM employs an external ASR model or scorer to weight unsupervised input samples in two different ways: 1) A fine-grained data selection is performed by masking over the highly confident input frames as chosen by the scorer. This allows the model to learn meaningful representations. 2) ATM is further extended to focus at utterance-level by weighting the final MSM loss with the utterance-level confidence score. We conduct fine-tuning experiments on two well-benchmarked corpora: LibriSpeech (matching the pre-training data) and Commonvoice, TED-LIUM, AMI and CHiME-6 (not matching the pre-training data). The results substantiate the efficacy of ATM on significantly improving the recognition performance under mismatched conditions (up to 11.6\% relative over published results and upto 4.46\% relative over our internal baseline) while still yielding modest improvements under matched conditions.

Generative transformers have experienced rapid popularity growth in the computer vision community in synthesizing high-fidelity and high-resolution images. The best generative transformer models so far, however, still treat an image naively as a sequence of tokens, and decode an image sequentially following the raster scan ordering (i.e. line-by-line). We find this strategy neither optimal nor efficient. This paper proposes a novel image synthesis paradigm using a bidirectional transformer decoder, which we term MaskGIT. During training, MaskGIT learns to predict randomly masked tokens by attending to tokens in all directions. At inference time, the model begins with generating all tokens of an image simultaneously, and then refines the image iteratively conditioned on the previous generation. Our experiments demonstrate that MaskGIT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art transformer model on the ImageNet dataset, and accelerates autoregressive decoding by up to 64x. Besides, we illustrate that MaskGIT can be easily extended to various image editing tasks, such as inpainting, extrapolation, and image manipulation.

We present Masked Feature Prediction (MaskFeat) for self-supervised pre-training of video models. Our approach first randomly masks out a portion of the input sequence and then predicts the feature of the masked regions. We study five different types of features and find Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), a hand-crafted feature descriptor, works particularly well in terms of both performance and efficiency. We observe that the local contrast normalization in HOG is essential for good results, which is in line with earlier work using HOG for visual recognition. Our approach can learn abundant visual knowledge and drive large-scale Transformer-based models. Without using extra model weights or supervision, MaskFeat pre-trained on unlabeled videos achieves unprecedented results of 86.7% with MViT-L on Kinetics-400, 88.3% on Kinetics-600, 80.4% on Kinetics-700, 39.8 mAP on AVA, and 75.0% on SSv2. MaskFeat further generalizes to image input, which can be interpreted as a video with a single frame and obtains competitive results on ImageNet.

Masked language model and autoregressive language model are two types of language models. While pretrained masked language models such as BERT overwhelm the line of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, autoregressive language models such as GPT are especially capable in natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we propose a probabilistic masking scheme for the masked language model, which we call probabilistically masked language model (PMLM). We implement a specific PMLM with a uniform prior distribution on the masking ratio named u-PMLM. We prove that u-PMLM is equivalent to an autoregressive permutated language model. One main advantage of the model is that it supports text generation in arbitrary order with surprisingly good quality, which could potentially enable new applications over traditional unidirectional generation. Besides, the pretrained u-PMLM also outperforms BERT on a set of downstream NLU tasks.

Pretrained masked language models (MLMs) require finetuning for most NLP tasks. Instead, we evaluate MLMs out of the box via their pseudo-log-likelihood scores (PLLs), which are computed by masking tokens one by one. We show that PLLs outperform scores from autoregressive language models like GPT-2 in a variety of tasks. By rescoring ASR and NMT hypotheses, RoBERTa reduces an end-to-end LibriSpeech model's WER by 30% relative and adds up to +1.7 BLEU on state-of-the-art baselines for low-resource translation pairs, with further gains from domain adaptation. We attribute this success to PLL's unsupervised expression of linguistic acceptability without a left-to-right bias, greatly improving on scores from GPT-2 (+10 points on island effects, NPI licensing in BLiMP). One can finetune MLMs to give scores without masking, enabling computation in a single inference pass. In all, PLLs and their associated pseudo-perplexities (PPPLs) enable plug-and-play use of the growing number of pretrained MLMs; e.g., we use a single cross-lingual model to rescore translations in multiple languages. We release our library for language model scoring at https://github.com/awslabs/mlm-scoring.