Maya group members lose connections to Group nodes when you export them to 3ds Max. This means that members of a group do not inherit the group node's visibility setting when exported.
For example, if a sphere in Maya is a member of an invisible group node called SphereGroup, but the sphere's visibility property is visible, the sphere takes on the group node visibility property and become invisible. This is the expected behavior in Maya.
However, when you export this from Maya and import into 3ds Max, the sphere is visible again. This is because the sphere loses its connection to the hide property of the SphereGroup on import to 3ds Max.
The undoing of visibility settings occurs when a group node is hidden (or its layer is hidden). When this happens all members of the group become hidden by default. This causes no problems with the import or export of these nodes, as long as you remain within Maya.
But 3ds Max objects do not inherit Hide/Unhide properties, only visibility properties, so all Maya hidden group members become unhidden when imported into 3ds Max. This is because the FBX conversion converts group nodes to dummy objects that are the parent of its members in 3ds Max. In this case, as only the group nodes are technically in each display layer you create, members become a part of the default layer.
Also see Where are my display layer properties?
