Despite its practical importance across a wide range of modalities, recent
advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have been primarily focused on a few
well-curated domains, e.g., vision and language, often relying on their
domain-specific knowledge. For example, Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) has become
one of the popular architectures in these domains, but less has explored its
potential in other modalities. In this paper, we develop MAE as a unified,
modality-agnostic SSL framework. In turn, we argue meta-learning as a key to
interpreting MAE as a modality-agnostic learner, and propose enhancements to
MAE from the motivation to jointly improve its SSL across diverse modalities,
coined MetaMAE as a result. Our key idea is to view the mask reconstruction of
MAE as a meta-learning task: masked tokens are predicted by adapting the
Transformer meta-learner through the amortization of unmasked tokens. Based on
this novel interpretation, we propose to integrate two advanced meta-learning
techniques. First, we adapt the amortized latent of the Transformer encoder
using gradient-based meta-learning to enhance the reconstruction. Then, we
maximize the alignment between amortized and adapted latents through task
contrastive learning which guides the Transformer encoder to better encode the
task-specific knowledge. Our experiment demonstrates the superiority of MetaMAE
in the modality-agnostic SSL benchmark (called DABS), significantly
outperforming prior baselines. Code is available at
this https URL

通过将 Masked Auto-Encoder（MAE）作为一个统一的、与模态无关的自监督学习框架，通过元学习对其进行解读，并从统一提高其在不同模态下的自监督学习的动机出发，我们提出了 MetaMAE。我们的关键思想是将 MAE 的掩码重构视为元学习任务，并通过未掩码标记的变换器元学习的涉及来预测掩码令牌。基于这个新颖的解读，我们提出了集成两种先进的元学习技术的方法。首先，我们使用基于梯度的元学习来适应变换器编码器的平均潜在因素以增强重构。然后，我们通过任务对比学习来最大化平均化和适应化潜在因素之间的对齐，从而指导变换器编码器更好地编码任务特定的知识。我们的实验证明了 MetaMAE 在与模态无关的自监督学习基准（称为 DABS）中的优越性，明显优于之前的基线。