MAE (Masked Autoencoders) is a self-supervised learning framework for visual representation learning using masked image modeling. It trains a Vision Transformer (ViT) by randomly masking a high percentage of image patches (typically 75%) and reconstructing the missing content from the remaining visible patches. This forces the model to learn semantic structure and global context without supervision. The encoder processes only the visible patches, while a lightweight decoder reconstructs the full image—making pretraining computationally efficient. ...