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With the development of generative-based self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches like BeiT and MAE, how to learn good representations by masking random patches of the input image and reconstructing the missing information has grown in concern. However, BeiT and PeCo need a “pre-pretraining” stage to produce discrete codebooks for masked patches representing. MAE does not require a pre-training codebook process, but setting pixels as reconstruction targets may introduce an optimization gap between pre-training and downstream tasks that good reconstruction quality may not always lead to the high descriptive capability for the model. Considering the above issues, in this paper, we propose a simple Self-distillated masked AutoEncoder network, namely SdAE. SdAE consists of a student branch using an encoder-decoder structure to reconstruct the missing information, and a teacher branch …