A Theoretical Framework for Masked Pretraining (MPT)
Recently, Masked Pretraining (MPT) based on reconstruction pretraining tasks has risen to a promising self-supervised learning paradigm across various domains and achieves remarkable performance in multiple downstream tasks. However, the theoretical understanding of the working mechanism behind MPT is still limited. In this paper, we introduce a new theoretical framework to analyze MPT and understand the crucial role of masking in extracting meaningful representations. We establish theoretical connections between MPT and another popular self-supervised paradigm: contrastive learning. We prove that the masking technique implicitly creates positive pairs that are semantically similar and th...
| Authors | Qi Zhang, Runyu Zhou, Yifei Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 6 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 September 2026 |
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