RevColV2: Exploring Disentangled Representations in Masked Image Modeling

Masked image modeling (MIM) has become a prevalent pre-training setup for vision foundation models and attains promising performance. Despite its success, existing MIM methods discard the decoder network during downstream applica- tions, resulting in inconsistent representations between pre-training and fine-tuning and can hamper downstream task performance. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, RevColV2, which tackles this issue by keeping the entire autoen- coder architecture during both pre-training and fine-tuning. The main body of RevColV2 contains bottom-up columns and top-down columns, between which information is reversibly propagated and gradually disentangled. Such design enables our architecture with the nice property: maintaining disentangled low-level and semantic information at the end of the network in MIM pre-training. Our experimental results suggest that a foundation model with decoupled features can achieve competitive performance across multiple downstream vision tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection. For exam- ple, after intermediate fine-tuning on ImageNet-22K dataset, RevColV2-L attains 88.4\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification and 58.6 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. With extra teacher and large scale dataset, RevColv2-L achieves 62.1 APbox on COCO detection and 60.4 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation.