2021/10/01 by Wenhai Wang, Enze Xie, Xiang Li +6 · 95 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
paper · doi:10.1109/iccv48922.2021.00061
openalex publication_date 2021/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in computer vision, this work investigates a simpler, convolution-free backbone network use-fid for many dense prediction tasks. Unlike the recently-proposed Vision Transformer (ViT) that was designed for image classification specifically, we introduce the Pyramid Vision Transformer (PVT), which overcomes the difficulties of porting Transformer to various dense prediction tasks. PVT has several merits compared to current state of the arts. (1) Different from ViT that typically yields low-resolution outputs and incurs high computational and memory costs, PVT not only can be trained on dense partitions of an image to achieve high output resolution, which is important for dense prediction, but also uses a progressive shrinking pyramid to reduce the computations of large feature maps. (2) PVT inherits the advantages of both CNN and Transformer, making it a unified backbone for various vision tasks without convolutions, where it can be used as a direct replacement for CNN backbones. (3) We validate PVT through extensive experiments, showing that it boosts the performance of many downstream tasks, including object detection, instance and semantic segmentation. For example, with a comparable number of parameters, PVT+RetinaNet achieves 40.4 AP on the COCO dataset, surpassing ResNet50+RetinNet (36.3 AP) by 4.1 absolute AP (see Figure 2). We hope that PVT could, serre as an alternative and useful backbone for pixel-level predictions and facilitate future research.