Exploring the Coordination of Frequency and Attention in Masked Image Modeling
This work addresses the high computational cost of MIM pre-training for computer vision researchers, offering a plug-and-play module that improves efficiency and performance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing MIM frameworks.
The paper tackles the inefficiency of masked image modeling (MIM) in self-supervised learning by proposing FAMT, a method that uses frequency and attention to select semantic patches for masking and reduces training patches, resulting in a 50% reduction in training time and up to 3.9% improvement in linear probing accuracy.
Recently, masked image modeling (MIM), which learns visual representations by reconstructing the masked patches of an image, has dominated self-supervised learning in computer vision. However, the pre-training of MIM always takes massive time due to the large-scale data and large-size backbones. We mainly attribute it to the random patch masking in previous MIM works, which fails to leverage the crucial semantic information for effective visual representation learning. To tackle this issue, we propose the Frequency \& Attention-driven Masking and Throwing Strategy (FAMT), which can extract semantic patches and reduce the number of training patches to boost model performance and training efficiency simultaneously. Specifically, FAMT utilizes the self-attention mechanism to extract semantic information from the image for masking during training in an unsupervised manner. However, attention alone could sometimes focus on inappropriate areas regarding the semantic information. Thus, we are motivated to incorporate the information from the frequency domain into the self-attention mechanism to derive the sampling weights for masking, which captures semantic patches for visual representation learning. Furthermore, we introduce a patch throwing strategy based on the derived sampling weights to reduce the training cost. FAMT can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play module and surpasses previous works, \emph{e.g.} reducing the training phase time by nearly $50\%$ and improving the linear probing accuracy of MAE by $1.3\% \sim 3.9\%$ across various datasets, including CIFAR-10/100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K. FAMT also demonstrates superior performance in downstream detection and segmentation tasks.