Delving Deeper into Data Scaling in Masked Image Modeling
It addresses the scaling capability of self-supervised learning for visual recognition, offering empirical insights for future research, but is incremental as it extends existing methods to a new dataset.
The paper investigates how masked image modeling (MIM) methods scale with data size using the web-collected Coyo-700M dataset, finding that MIM improves model capacity with small data, strong reconstruction targets enhance downstream performance, and pre-training is largely data-agnostic.
Understanding whether self-supervised learning methods can scale with unlimited data is crucial for training large-scale models. In this work, we conduct an empirical study on the scaling capability of masked image modeling (MIM) methods (e.g., MAE) for visual recognition. Unlike most previous works that depend on the widely-used ImageNet dataset, which is manually curated and object-centric, we take a step further and propose to investigate this problem in a more practical setting. Specifically, we utilize the web-collected Coyo-700M dataset. We randomly sample varying numbers of training images from the Coyo dataset and construct a series of sub-datasets, containing 0.5M, 1M, 5M, 10M, and 100M images, for pre-training. Our goal is to investigate how the performance changes on downstream tasks when scaling with different sizes of data and models. The study reveals that: 1) MIM can be viewed as an effective method to improve the model capacity when the scale of the training data is relatively small; 2) Strong reconstruction targets can endow the models with increased capacities on downstream tasks; 3) MIM pre-training is data-agnostic under most scenarios, which means that the strategy of sampling pre-training data is non-critical. We hope these observations could provide valuable insights for future research on MIM.