

MAE (masked auto encoding) is a method for self-supervised pre-training of Vision Transformers (ViTs). The pre-training objective is relatively simple:
by masking a large portion (75%) of the image patches, the model must reconstruct raw pixel values. One can use [ViTMAEForPreTraining] for this purpose.
After pre-training, one "throws away" the decoder used to reconstruct pixels, and one uses the encoder for fine-tuning/linear probing. This means that after
fine-tuning, one can directly plug in the weights into a [ViTForImageClassification].
One can use [ViTImageProcessor] to prepare images for the model. See the code examples for more info.
Note that the encoder of MAE is only used to encode the visual patches. The encoded patches are then concatenated with mask tokens, which the decoder (which also
consists of Transformer blocks) takes as input. Each mask token is a shared, learned vector that indicates the presence of a missing patch to be predicted. Fixed
sin/cos position embeddings are added both to the input of the encoder and the decoder.
For a visual understanding of how MAEs work you can check out this post.