Efficient VideoMAE via Temporal Progressive Training

Xianhang Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Li, Heng Wang, Hongru Zhu, Cihang Xie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2025, pp. 2659-2668

Masked autoencoders (MAE) have recently been adapted for video recognition, setting new performance benchmarks. Nonetheless, the computational overhead of training VideoMAE remains a prominent challenge, often demanding extensive GPU resources and days of training. To improve the efficiency of VideoMAE training, this paper presents Temporal Progressive Training (TPT), a simple yet effective method that strategically introduces longer video clips along the training process. Specifically, TPT decomposes the intricate task of long-clip reconstruction into a series of incremental sub-tasks, progressively transitioning from short to long video clips. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of TPT. For example, TPT reduces training costs by factors of 2xon Kinetics-400 and 3xon Something-Something V2, while maintaining the performance of VideoMAE. Furthermore, when given the same training budget, TPT consistently surpasses VideoMAE by 0.4-0.5% on Kinetics-400 and 0.2-0.6% on Something-Something V2.