From Semantics to Pixels: Coarse-to-Fine Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Visual Understanding

Abstract: Self-supervised visual pre-training methods face an inherent tension: contrastive learning (CL) captures global semantics but loses fine-grained detail, while masked image modeling (MIM) preserves local textures but suffers from "attention drift" due to semantically-agnostic random masking. We propose C2FMAE, a coarse-to-fine masked autoencoder that resolves this tension by explicitly learning hierarchical visual representations across three data granularities: semantic masks (scene-level), instance masks (object-level), and RGB images (pixel-level). Two synergistic innovations enforce a strict top-down learning principle. First, a cascaded decoder sequentially reconstructs from scene semantics to object instances to pixel details, establishing explicit cross-granularity dependencies that parallel decoders cannot capture. Second, a progressive masking curriculum dynamically shifts the training focus from semantic-guided to instance-guided and finally to random masking, creating a structured learning path from global context to local features. To support this framework, we construct a large-scale multi-granular dataset with high-quality pseudo-labels for all 1.28M ImageNet-1K images. Extensive experiments show that C2FMAE achieves significant performance gains on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, validating the effectiveness of our hierarchical design in learning more robust and generalizable representations.