2022/08/28 by Yutong Xie, Xie, Yutong, Jianpeng Zhang +7
Computer Science · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2208.13138
openalex publication_date 2022/08/28 · openalex created_date 2022/08/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Although Transformers have successfully transitioned from their language modelling origins to image-based applications, their quadratic computational complexity remains a challenge, particularly for dense prediction. In this paper we propose a content-based sparse attention method, as an alternative to dense self-attention, aiming to reduce the computation complexity while retaining the ability to model long-range dependencies. Specifically, we cluster and then aggregate key and value tokens, as a content-based method of reducing the total token count. The resulting clustered-token sequence retains the semantic diversity of the original signal, but can be processed at a lower computational cost. Besides, we further extend the clustering-guided attention from single-scale to multi-scale, which is conducive to dense prediction tasks. We label the proposed Transformer architecture ClusTR, and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance on various vision tasks but at lower computational cost and with fewer parameters. For instance, our ClusTR small model with 22.7M parameters achieves 83.2% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Source code and ImageNet models will be made publicly available.