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# ViTMAE

## Overview

The ViTMAE model was proposed in [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06377v2) by Kaiming He, Xinlei Chen, Saining Xie, Yanghao Li,
Piotr Dollár, Ross Girshick. The paper shows that, by pre-training a Vision Transformer (ViT) to reconstruct pixel values for masked patches, one can get results after
fine-tuning that outperform supervised pre-training.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

*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.*

Tips:

- MAE (masked auto encoding) is a method for self-supervised pre-training of Vision Transformers (ViTs). The pre-training objective is relatively simple:
by masking a large portion (75%) of the image patches, the model must reconstruct raw pixel values. One can use [`ViTMAEForPreTraining`] for this purpose.
- An example Python script that illustrates how to pre-train [`ViTMAEForPreTraining`] from scratch can be found [here](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/main/examples/pytorch/image-pretraining).
One can easily tweak it for their own use case.
- A notebook that illustrates how to visualize reconstructed pixel values with [`ViTMAEForPreTraining`] can be found [here](https://github.com/NielsRogge/Transformers-Tutorials/blob/master/ViTMAE/ViT_MAE_visualization_demo.ipynb).
- After pre-training, one "throws away" the decoder used to reconstruct pixels, and one uses the encoder for fine-tuning/linear probing. This means that after
fine-tuning, one can directly plug in the weights into a [`ViTForImageClassification`].
- One can use [`ViTFeatureExtractor`] to prepare images for the model. See the code examples for more info. 
- Note that the encoder of MAE is only used to encode the visual patches. The encoded patches are then concatenated with mask tokens, which the decoder (which also
consists of Transformer blocks) takes as input. Each mask token is a shared, learned vector that indicates the presence of a missing patch to be predicted. Fixed
sin/cos position embeddings are added both to the input of the encoder and the decoder.

<img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/11435359/146857310-f258c86c-fde6-48e8-9cee-badd2b21bd2c.png"
alt="drawing" width="600"/> 

<small> MAE architecture. Taken from the <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06377">original paper.</a> </small>

This model was contributed by [nielsr](https://huggingface.co/nielsr). The original code can be found [here](https://github.com/facebookresearch/mae).

## ViTMAEConfig

[[autodoc]] ViTMAEConfig


## ViTMAEModel

[[autodoc]] ViTMAEModel
    - forward


## ViTMAEForPreTraining

[[autodoc]] transformers.ViTMAEForPreTraining
    - forward
