Evolved Part Masking for Self-Supervised Learning

Existing Masked Image Modeling methods apply fixed mask patterns to guide the self-supervised training. As those patterns resort to different criteria to mask local regions, sticking to a fixed pattern leads to limited vision cues modeling capability. This paper proposes an evolved part-based masking to pursue more general visual cues modeling in self-supervised learning. Our method is based on an adaptive part partition module, which leverages the vision model being trained to construct a part graph, and partitions parts with graph cut. The accuracy of partitioned parts is on par with the capability of the pre-trained model, leading to evolved mask patterns at different training stages. It generates simple patterns at the initial training stage to learn low-level visual cues, which hence evolves to eliminate accurate object parts to reinforce the learning of object semantics and contexts. Our method does not require extra pre-trained models or annotations, and effectively ensures the training efficiency by evolving the training difficulty. Experiment results show that it substantially boosts the performance on various tasks including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. For example, it outperforms the recent MAE by 0.69% on imageNet-1K classification and 1.61% on ADE20K segmentation with the same training epochs.