CurMIM: Curriculum Masked Image Modeling

Masked Image Modeling (MIM), following “mask-and-reconstruct” scheme, is a promising self-supervised method to learn scalable visual representation. Studies indicate that selecting an effective mask strategy is vital for MIM. However, existing approaches often rely on static pre-defined priors, which limit their ability to adapt mask strategies dynamically for network optimization. In this paper, we focus on the learning process of the network and introduce human-like curriculum into MIM for dynamic representation refinement, and propose an end-to-end framework Curriculum Masked Image Modeling (CurMIM). CurMIM consists of two components: Mask Priority Measurer, which acts as a curriculum learner to determine mask priority values using the network's intrinsic state information, and Dual Adaptive Selector, which serves as a curriculum scheduler to create effective masks based on these values. With negligible extra parameters, our curriculum-based method consistently establishes noticeable improvements across varying model sizes and benchmarks, showing effectiveness and generalization.