Towards Understanding Why Mask Reconstruction Pretraining Helps in Downstream Tasks

For unsupervised pretraining, mask-reconstruction pretraining (MRP) approaches, e.g. MAE and data2vec, randomly mask input patches and then reconstruct the pixels or semantic features of these masked patches via an auto-encoder. Then for a downstream task, supervised fine-tuning the pretrained encoder remarkably surpasses the conventional "supervised learning" (SL) trained from scratch. However, it is still unclear 1) how MRP performs semantic (feature) learning in the pretraining phase and 2) why it helps in downstream tasks. To solve these problems, we first theoretically show that on an auto-encoder of a two/one-layered convolution encoder/decoder, MRP can capture all discriminative semantics of each potential semantic class in the pretraining dataset. Then considering the fact that the pretraining dataset is of huge size and high diversity and thus covers most semantics in downstream dataset, in fine-tuning phase, the pretrained encoder can capture as much semantics as it can in downstream datasets, and would not lost these semantics with theoretical guarantees. In contrast, SL only randomly captures some semantics due to lottery ticket hypothesis. So MRP provably achieves better performance than SL on the classification tasks. Experimental results testify to our data assumptions and also our theoretical implications.