English

MSVIT: Improving Spiking Vision Transformer Using Multi-scale Attention Fusion

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-06-19 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Vision Transformer architectures has garnered significant attention due to their potential for energy-efficient and high-performance computing paradigms. However, a substantial performance gap still exists between SNN-based and ANN-based transformer architectures. While existing methods propose spiking self-attention mechanisms that are successfully combined with SNNs, the overall architectures proposed by these methods suffer from a bottleneck in effectively extracting features from different image scales. In this paper, we address this issue and propose MSVIT. This novel spike-driven Transformer architecture firstly uses multi-scale spiking attention (MSSA) to enhance the capabilities of spiking attention blocks. We validate our approach across various main datasets. The experimental results show that MSVIT outperforms existing SNN-based models, positioning itself as a state-of-the-art solution among SNN-transformer architectures. The codes are available at https://github.com/Nanhu-AI-Lab/MSViT.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.14719,
  title  = {MSVIT: Improving Spiking Vision Transformer Using Multi-scale Attention Fusion},
  author = {Wei Hua and Chenlin Zhou and Jibin Wu and Yansong Chua and Yangyang Shu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.14719},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11pages, 2figures, accepted by IJCAI'25 (34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:26:09.470Z