Papers › Hi-End-MAE: Hierarchical encoder-driven masked autoencoders are stronger vision...

Hi-End-MAE: Hierarchical encoder-driven masked autoencoders are stronger vision learners for medical image segmentation

12 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.08347archive 2025-07-28

Fenghe Tang, Qingsong Yao, Wenxin Ma, Chenxu Wu, Zihang Jiang, S. Kevin Zhou

Medical image segmentation remains a formidable challenge due to the label scarcity. Pre-training Vision Transformer (ViT) through masked image modeling (MIM) on large-scale unlabeled medical datasets presents a promising solution, providing both computational efficiency and model generalization for various downstream tasks. However, current ViT-based MIM pre-training frameworks predominantly emphasize local aggregation representations in output layers and fail to exploit the rich representations across different ViT layers that better capture fine-grained semantic information needed for more precise medical downstream tasks. To fill the above gap, we hereby present Hierarchical Encoder-driven MAE (Hi-End-MAE), a simple yet effective ViT-based pre-training solution, which centers on two key innovations: (1) Encoder-driven reconstruction, which encourages the encoder to learn more informative features to guide the reconstruction of masked patches; and (2) Hierarchical dense decoding, which implements a hierarchical decoding structure to capture rich representations across different layers. We pre-train Hi-End-MAE on a large-scale dataset of 10K CT scans and evaluated its performance across seven public medical image segmentation benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-End-MAE achieves superior transfer learning capabilities across various downstream tasks, revealing the potential of ViT in medical imaging applications. The code is available at: https://github.com/FengheTan9/Hi-End-MAE

Paper PDF Code

Code

fenghetan9/hi-end-mae officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Computational Efficiency Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Semantic Segmentation Transfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position Encodings Adam Attention BPE Dense Connections Dropout Label Smoothing Layer Normalization Linear Layer MAE MIM Multi-Head Attention Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer Residual Connection Softmax Transformer Vision Transformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections