  Masked autoencoders (MAEs) have established themselves as a powerful method
for unsupervised pre-training for computer vision tasks. While vanilla MAEs put
equal emphasis on reconstructing the individual parts of the image, we propose
to inform the reconstruction process through an attention-guided loss function.
By leveraging advances in unsupervised object discovery, we obtain an attention
map of the scene which we employ in the loss function to put increased emphasis
on reconstructing relevant objects, thus effectively incentivizing the model to
learn more object-focused representations without compromising the established
masking strategy. Our evaluations show that our pre-trained models learn better
latent representations than the vanilla MAE, demonstrated by improved linear
probing and k-NN classification results on several benchmarks while at the same
time making ViTs more robust against varying backgrounds.
