# Semi-MAE: Masked Autoencoders for Semi-supervised Vision Transformers

Source: [Semi-MAE: Masked Autoencoders for Semi-supervised Vision Transformers](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6e481e209131cea3ef2b>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:54:03.791Z

Authors: Haojie Yu, Kang Zhao, Xiaoming Xu

Published: 2023-01-04T03:59:17.000Z

## Abstract

Vision Transformer (ViT) suffers from data scarcity in semi-supervised learning (SSL). To alleviate this issue, inspired by masked autoencoder (MAE), which is a data-efficient self-supervised learner, we propose Semi-MAE, a pure ViT-based SSL framework consisting of a parallel MAE branch to assist the visual representation learning and make the pseudo labels more accurate. The MAE branch is designed as an asymmetric architecture consisting of a lightweight decoder and a shared-weights encoder. We feed the weakly-augmented unlabeled data with a high masking ratio to the MAE branch and reconstruct the missing pixels. Semi-MAE achieves 75.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 10% labels, surpassing prior state-of-the-art in semi-supervised image classification. In addition, extensive experiments demonstrate that Semi-MAE can be readily used for other ViT models and masked image modeling methods.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01431>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.01431.pdf>)
