Multi-View Masked Autoencoder for General Image Representation

Self-supervised learning is a method that learns general representation from unlabeled data. Masked image modeling (MIM), one of the generative self-supervised learning methods, has drawn attention for showing state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks, though it has shown poor linear separability resulting from the token-level approach. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning-based multi-view masked autoencoder for MIM, thus exploiting an image-level approach by learning common features from two different augmented views. We strengthen the MIM by learning long-range global patterns from contrastive loss. Our framework adopts a simple encoder-decoder architecture, thus learning rich and general representations by following a simple process: (1) Two different views are generated from an input image with random masking and by contrastive loss, we can learn the semantic distance of the representations generated by an encoder. By applying a high mask ratio, of 80%, it works as strong augmentation and alleviates the representation collapse problem. (2) With reconstruction loss, the decoder learns to reconstruct an original image from the masked image. We assessed our framework through several experiments on benchmark datasets of image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. We achieved 84.3% in fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification and 76.7% in linear probing, thus exceeding previous studies and showing promising results on other downstream tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our work can learn rich and general image representation by applying contrastive loss to masked image modeling.