English

Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Image Transformers

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2021-08-27 v2 Machine Learning Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

In this paper, we present Co-scale conv-attentional image Transformers (CoaT), a Transformer-based image classifier equipped with co-scale and conv-attentional mechanisms. First, the co-scale mechanism maintains the integrity of Transformers' encoder branches at individual scales, while allowing representations learned at different scales to effectively communicate with each other; we design a series of serial and parallel blocks to realize the co-scale mechanism. Second, we devise a conv-attentional mechanism by realizing a relative position embedding formulation in the factorized attention module with an efficient convolution-like implementation. CoaT empowers image Transformers with enriched multi-scale and contextual modeling capabilities. On ImageNet, relatively small CoaT models attain superior classification results compared with similar-sized convolutional neural networks and image/vision Transformers. The effectiveness of CoaT's backbone is also illustrated on object detection and instance segmentation, demonstrating its applicability to downstream computer vision tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.06399,
  title  = {Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Image Transformers},
  author = {Weijian Xu and Yifan Xu and Tyler Chang and Zhuowen Tu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.06399},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICCV 2021 (Oral)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:08:04.474Z