This work presents a systematic investigation into modernizing Vision Transformer backbones by leveraging architectural advancements from the past five years. While preserving the canonical Attention-FFN structure, we conduct a component-wise refinement involving normalization, activation functions, positional encoding, gating mechanisms, and learnable tokens. These updates form a new generation of Vision Transformers, which we call ViT-5. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViT-5 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art plain Vision Transformers across both understanding and generation benchmarks. On ImageNet-1k classification, ViT-5-Base reaches 84.2\% top-1 accuracy under comparable compute, exceeding DeiT-III-Base at 83.8\%. ViT-5 also serves as a stronger backbone for generative modeling: when plugged into an SiT diffusion framework, it achieves 1.84 FID versus 2.06 with a vanilla ViT backbone. Beyond headline metrics, ViT-5 exhibits improved representation learning and favorable spatial reasoning behavior, and transfers reliably across tasks. With a design aligned with contemporary foundation-model practices, ViT-5 offers a simple drop-in upgrade over vanilla ViT for mid-2020s vision backbones.
Transformer, an attention-based encoder-decoder architecture, has not only revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP), but has also done some pioneering work in the field of computer vision (CV). Compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the Vision Transformer (ViT) relies on excellent modeling capabilities to achieve very good performance on several benchmarks such as ImageNet, COCO, and ADE20k. ViT is inspired by the self-attention mechanism in natural language processing, where word embeddings are replaced with patch embeddings. This paper reviews the derivatives …
Chongqing University of Technology（重庆理工大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）
Recent advances of Transformers have brought new trust to computer vision tasks. However, on small dataset, Transformers is hard to train and has lower performance than convolutional neural networks. We make vision transformers as data-efficient as convolutional neural networks by introducing multi-focal attention bias. Inspired by the attention distance in a well-trained ViT, we constrain the self-attention of ViT to have multi-scale localized receptive field. The size of receptive field is adaptable during training so that optimal configuration can be learned. We provide empirical evidence t…
Vision Transformers (ViT) have made many breakthroughs in computer vision tasks. However, considerable redundancy arises in the spatial dimension of an input image, leading to massive computational costs. Therefore, We propose a coarse-to-fine vision transformer (CF-ViT) to relieve computational burden while retaining performance in this paper. Our proposed CF-ViT is motivated by two important observations in modern ViT models: (1) The coarse-grained patch splitting can locate informative regions of an input image. (2) Most images can be well recognized by a ViT model in a small-length token s…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Megvii Technology（旷视科技）
In this paper, we propose a fully differentiable quantization method for vision transformer (ViT) named as Q-ViT, in which both of the quantization scales and bit-widths are learnable parameters. Specifically, based on our observation that heads in ViT display different quantization robustness, we leverage head-wise bit-width to squeeze the size of Q-ViT while preserving performance. In addition, we propose a novel technique named switchable scale to resolve the convergence problem in the joint training of quantization scales and bit-widths. In this way, Q-ViT pushes the limits of ViT quantiza…
This paper proposes a working recipe of using Vision Transformer (ViT) in class incremental learning. Although this recipe only combines existing techniques, developing the combination is not trivial. Firstly, naive application of ViT to replace convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in incremental learning results in serious performance degradation. Secondly, we nail down three issues of naively using ViT: (a) ViT has very slow convergence when the number of classes is small, (b) more bias towards new classes is observed in ViT than CNN-based architectures, and (c) the conventional learning rat…
Vision transformers have become one of the most important models for computer vision tasks. Although they outperform prior works, they require heavy computational resources on a scale that is quadratic to $N$. This is a major drawback of the traditional self-attention (SA) algorithm. Here, we propose the Unit Force Operated Vision Transformer (UFO-ViT), a novel SA mechanism that has linear complexity. The main approach of this work is to eliminate nonlinearity from the original SA. We factorize the matrix multiplication of the SA mechanism without complicated linear approximation. By modifying…
This paper presents a pure transformer-based approach, dubbed the Multi-Modal Video Transformer (MM-ViT), for video action recognition. Different from other schemes which solely utilize the decoded RGB frames, MM-ViT operates exclusively in the compressed video domain and exploits all readily available modalities, i.e., I-frames, motion vectors, residuals and audio waveform. In order to handle the large number of spatiotemporal tokens extracted from multiple modalities, we develop several scalable model variants which factorize self-attention across the space, time and modality dimensions. In …
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
This work investigates a simple yet powerful dense prediction task adapter for Vision Transformer (ViT). Unlike recently advanced variants that incorporate vision-specific inductive biases into their architectures, the plain ViT suffers inferior performance on dense predictions due to weak prior assumptions. To address this issue, we propose the ViT-Adapter, which allows plain ViT to achieve comparable performance to vision-specific transformers. Specifically, the backbone in our framework is a plain ViT that can learn powerful representations from large-scale multi-modal data. When transferri…
Due to the complex attention mechanisms and model design, most existing vision Transformers (ViTs) can not perform as efficiently as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in realistic industrial deployment scenarios, e.g. TensorRT and CoreML. This poses a distinct challenge: Can a visual neural network be designed to infer as fast as CNNs and perform as powerful as ViTs? Recent works have tried to design CNN-Transformer hybrid architectures to address this issue, yet the overall performance of these works is far away from satisfactory. To end these, we propose a next generation vision Transform…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
Although no specific domain knowledge is considered in the design, plain vision transformers have shown excellent performance in visual recognition tasks. However, little effort has been made to reveal the potential of such simple structures for pose estimation tasks. In this paper, we show the surprisingly good capabilities of plain vision transformers for pose estimation from various aspects, namely simplicity in model structure, scalability in model size, flexibility in training paradigm, and transferability of knowledge between models, through a simple baseline model called ViTPose. Specif…
We revisit the existing excellent Transformers from the perspective of practical application. Most of them are not even as efficient as the basic ResNets series and deviate from the realistic deployment scenario. It may be due to the current criterion to measure computation efficiency, such as FLOPs or parameters is one-sided, sub-optimal, and hardware-insensitive. Thus, this paper directly treats the TensorRT latency on the specific hardware as an efficiency metric, which provides more comprehensive feedback involving computational capacity, memory cost, and bandwidth. Based on a series of co…
Yitu Tech（依图科技）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；YITU Technology Institute of Data Science（依图科技数据科学研究所）
Transformers, which are popular for language modeling, have been explored for solving vision tasks recently, e.g., the Vision Transformer (ViT) for image classification. The ViT model splits each image into a sequence of tokens with fixed length and then applies multiple Transformer layers to model their global relation for classification. However, ViT achieves inferior performance to CNNs when trained from scratch on a midsize dataset like ImageNet. We find it is because: 1) the simple tokenization of input images fails to model the important local structure such as edges and lines among neig…
University of La Rochelle（拉罗谢尔大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科技大学）
Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) is an important measure to prevent spoof attacks for face biometric systems. Many works based on Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) for face PAD formulate the problem as an image-level binary classification task without considering the context. Alternatively, Vision Transformers (ViT) using self-attention to attend the context of an image become the mainstreams in face PAD. Inspired by ViT, we propose a Video-based Transformer for face PAD (ViTransPAD) with short/long-range spatio-temporal attention which can not only focus on local details with short a…
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in a variety of vision tasks, replacing convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Meanwhile, since ViT has a different architecture than CNN, it may behave differently. To investigate the reliability of ViT, this paper studies the behavior and robustness of ViT. We compared the robustness of CNN and ViT by assuming various image corruptions that may appear in practical vision tasks. We confirmed that for most image transformations, ViT showed robustness comparable to CNN or more improved. However, for contrast enhan…
Network quantization significantly reduces model inference complexity and has been widely used in real-world deployments. However, most existing quantization methods have been developed mainly on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and suffer severe degradation when applied to fully quantized vision transformers. In this work, we demonstrate that many of these difficulties arise because of serious inter-channel variation in LayerNorm inputs, and present, Power-of-Two Factor (PTF), a systematic method to reduce the performance degradation and inference complexity of fully quantized vision tra…
James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学）；La Trobe University（乐卓博大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）
Recently vision transformer models have become prominent models for a range of vision tasks. These models, however, are usually opaque with weak feature interpretability. Moreover, there is no method currently built for an intrinsically interpretable transformer, which is able to explain its reasoning process and provide a faithful explanation. To close these crucial gaps, we propose a novel vision transformer dubbed the eXplainable Vision Transformer (eX-ViT), an intrinsically interpretable transformer model that is able to jointly discover robust interpretable features and perform the predic…
Positional encoding is important for vision transformer (ViT) to capture the spatial structure of the input image. General effectiveness has been proven in ViT. In our work we propose to train ViT to recognize the positional label of patches of the input image, this apparently simple task actually yields a meaningful self-supervisory task. Based on previous work on ViT positional encoding, we propose two positional labels dedicated to 2D images including absolute position and relative position. Our positional labels can be easily plugged into various current ViT variants. It can work in two wa…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
Transformers have shown great potential in various computer vision tasks owing to their strong capability in modeling long-range dependency using the self-attention mechanism. Nevertheless, vision transformers treat an image as 1D sequence of visual tokens, lacking an intrinsic inductive bias (IB) in modeling local visual structures and dealing with scale variance. Alternatively, they require large-scale training data and longer training schedules to learn the IB implicitly. In this paper, we propose a novel Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring intrinsic IB from convolutions, ie, ViTAE. Te…
Human activity recognition is an emerging and important area in computer vision which seeks to determine the activity an individual or group of individuals are performing. The applications of this field ranges from generating highlight videos in sports, to intelligent surveillance and gesture recognition. Most activity recognition systems rely on a combination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to perform feature extraction from the data and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to determine the time dependent nature of the data. This paper proposes and designs two transformer neural networks …
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning Technology and Application（深度学习技术及应用国家工程实验室）
The large pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various visual tasks, but suffer from expensive computational and memory cost problems when deployed on resource-constrained devices. Among the powerful compression approaches, quantization extremely reduces the computation and memory consumption by low-bit parameters and bit-wise operations. However, low-bit ViTs remain largely unexplored and usually suffer from a significant performance drop compared with the real-valued counterparts. In this work, through extensive empirical analysis, we first ident…
JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Self-supervised pre-training vision transformer (ViT) via masked image modeling (MIM) has been proven very effective. However, customized algorithms should be carefully designed for the hierarchical ViTs, e.g., GreenMIM, instead of using the vanilla and simple MAE for the plain ViT. More importantly, since these hierarchical ViTs cannot reuse the off-the-shelf pre-trained weights of the plain ViTs, the requirement of pre-training them leads to a massive amount of computational cost, thereby incurring both algorithmic and computational complexity. In this paper, we address this problem by propo…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Vision Transformer (ViT) is emerging as the state-of-the-art architecture for image recognition. While recent studies suggest that ViTs are more robust than their convolutional counterparts, our experiments find that ViTs trained on ImageNet are overly reliant on local textures and fail to make adequate use of shape information. ViTs thus have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution, real-world data. To address this deficiency, we present a simple and effective architecture modification to ViT's input layer by adding discrete tokens produced by a vector-quantized encoder. Different fr…
Recently, several Vision Transformer (ViT) based methods have been proposed for Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC).These methods significantly surpass existing CNN-based ones, demonstrating the effectiveness of ViT in FGVC tasks.However, there are some limitations when applying ViT directly to FGVC.First, ViT needs to split images into patches and calculate the attention of every pair, which may result in heavy redundant calculation and unsatisfying performance when handling fine-grained images with complex background and small objects.Second, a standard ViT only utilizes the class toke…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In this paper, we investigate the application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to improve the perception performance of autonomous vehicles. We present a robust cooperative perception framework with V2X communication using a novel vision Transformer. Specifically, we build a holistic attention model, namely V2X-ViT, to effectively fuse information across on-road agents (i.e., vehicles and infrastructure). V2X-ViT consists of alternating layers of heterogeneous multi-agent self-attention and multi-scale window self-attention, which captures inter-agent interaction and per-agent spat…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
The success of Vision Transformer (ViT) in various computer vision tasks has promoted the ever-increasing prevalence of this convolution-free network. The fact that ViT works on image patches makes it potentially relevant to the problem of jigsaw puzzle solving, which is a classical self-supervised task aiming at reordering shuffled sequential image patches back to their natural form. Despite its simplicity, solving jigsaw puzzle has been demonstrated to be helpful for diverse tasks using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as self-supervised feature representation learning, domain gene…
Although transformer networks are recently employed in various vision tasks with outperforming performance, extensive training data and a lengthy training time are required to train a model to disregard an inductive bias. Using trainable links between the channel-wise spatial attention of a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the attention head of Vision Transformers (ViT), we present a regularization technique to improve the training efficiency of ViT. The trainable links are referred to as the attention augmentation module, which is trained simultaneously with ViT, boosting th…
Recently, vision transformer (ViT) and its variants have achieved promising performances in various computer vision tasks. Yet the high computational costs and training data requirements of ViTs limit their application in resource-constrained settings. Model compression is an effective method to speed up deep learning models, but the research of compressing ViTs has been less explored. Many previous works concentrate on reducing the number of tokens. However, this line of attack breaks down the spatial structure of ViTs and is hard to be generalized into downstream tasks. In this paper, we des…
Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Sorbonne University（索邦大学）
In this paper, we question if self-supervised learning provides new properties to Vision Transformer (ViT) that stand out compared to convolutional networks (convnets). Beyond the fact that adapting self-supervised methods to this architecture works particularly well, we make the following observations: first, self-supervised ViT features contain explicit information about the semantic segmentation of an image, which does not emerge as clearly with supervised ViTs, nor with convnets. Second, these features are also excellent k-NN classifiers, reaching 78.3% top-1 on ImageNet with a small ViT. …
Hamilton Institute Maynooth University（汉密尔顿研究所梅努斯大学）；Valeo Vision Systems（法雷奥视觉系统公司）；Maynooth University（梅努斯大学）
Generating a detailed near-field perceptual model of the environment is an important and challenging problem in both self-driving vehicles and autonomous mobile robotics. A Bird Eye View (BEV) map, providing a panoptic representation, is a commonly used approach that provides a simplified 2D representation of the vehicle surroundings with accurate semantic level segmentation for many downstream tasks. Current state-of-the art approaches to generate BEV-maps employ a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbone to create feature-maps which are passed through a spatial transformer to project the …
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Qing Yuan Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学清源研究院）；Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence（感知与交互智能研究中心）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Transformers with powerful global relation modeling abilities have been introduced to fundamental computer vision tasks recently. As a typical example, the Vision Transformer (ViT) directly applies a pure transformer architecture on image classification, by simply splitting images into tokens with a fixed length, and employing transformers to learn relations between these tokens. However, such naive tokenization could destruct object structures, assign grids to uninterested regions such as background, and introduce interference signals. To mitigate the above issues, in this paper, we propose a…
Facial expression recognition (FER) is a challenging topic in artificial intelligence. Recently, many researchers have attempted to introduce Vision Transformer (ViT) to the FER task. However, ViT cannot fully utilize emotional features extracted from raw images and requires a lot of computing resources. To overcome these problems, we propose a quaternion orthogonal transformer (QOT) for FER. Firstly, to reduce redundancy among features extracted from pre-trained ResNet-50, we use the orthogonal loss to decompose and compact these features into three sets of orthogonal sub-features. Secondly, …
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Learning with little data is challenging but often inevitable in various application scenarios where the labeled data is limited and costly. Recently, few-shot learning (FSL) gained increasing attention because of its generalizability of prior knowledge to new tasks that contain only a few samples. However, for data-intensive models such as vision transformer (ViT), current fine-tuning based FSL approaches are inefficient in knowledge generalization and thus degenerate the downstream task performances. In this paper, we propose a novel mask-guided vision transformer (MG-ViT) to achieve an effe…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
Vision transformers have shown great potential in various computer vision tasks owing to their strong capability to model long-range dependency using the self-attention mechanism. Nevertheless, they treat an image as a 1D sequence of visual tokens, lacking an intrinsic inductive bias (IB) in modeling local visual structures and dealing with scale variance, which is instead learned implicitly from large-scale training data with longer training schedules. In this paper, we propose a Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring intrinsic IB from convolutions, i.e., ViTAE. Technically, ViTAE has sever…
As a special type of transformer, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are used to various computer vision applications (CV), such as image recognition. There are several potential problems with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can be solved with ViTs. For image coding tasks like compression, super-resolution, segmentation, and denoising, different variants of the ViTs are used. The purpose of this survey is to present the first application of ViTs in CV. The survey is the first of its kind on ViTs for CVs to the best of our knowledge. In the first step, we classify different CV applications wh…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently received explosive popularity, but the huge computational cost is still a severe issue. Since the computation complexity of ViT is quadratic with respect to the input sequence length, a mainstream paradigm for computation reduction is to reduce the number of tokens. Existing designs include structured spatial compression that uses a progressive shrinking pyramid to reduce the computations of large feature maps, and unstructured token pruning that dynamically drops redundant tokens. However, the limitation of existing token pruning lies in two folds: 1) …
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；ByteDance US AI Lab（字节跳动美国人工智能实验室）
Vision transformers (ViTs) have been successfully applied in image classification tasks recently. In this paper, we show that, unlike convolution neural networks (CNNs)that can be improved by stacking more convolutional layers, the performance of ViTs saturate fast when scaled to be deeper. More specifically, we empirically observe that such scaling difficulty is caused by the attention collapse issue: as the transformer goes deeper, the attention maps gradually become similar and even much the same after certain layers. In other words, the feature maps tend to be identical in the top layers o…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Tencent（腾讯）
Vision Transformer (ViT), as a powerful alternative to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), has received much attention. Recent work showed that ViTs are also vulnerable to adversarial examples like CNNs. To build robust ViTs, an intuitive way is to apply adversarial training since it has been shown as one of the most effective ways to accomplish robust CNNs. However, one major limitation of adversarial training is its heavy computational cost. The self-attention mechanism adopted by ViTs is a computationally intense operation whose expense increases quadratically with the number of input patch…
The past few years have seen an increased interest in aerial image object detection due to its critical value to large-scale geo-scientific research like environmental studies, urban planning, and intelligence monitoring. However, the task is very challenging due to the birds-eye view perspective, complex backgrounds, large and various image sizes, different appearances of objects, and the scarcity of well-annotated datasets. Recent advances in computer vision have shown promise tackling the challenge. Specifically, Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet) was proposed to extract multi-scale featu…
DopQ-ViT: Towards Distribution-Friendly and Outlier-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of Siegen（锡根大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔信息学园区）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Recently, transformers have shown great potential in image classification and established state-of-the-art results on the ImageNet benchmark. However, compared to CNNs, transformers converge slowly and are prone to overfitting in low-data regimes due to the lack of spatial inductive biases. Such spatial inductive biases can be especially beneficial since the 2D structure of an input image is not well preserved in transformers. In this work, we present Spatial Prior-enhanced Self-Attention (SP-SA), a novel variant of vanilla Self-Attention (SA) tailored for vision transformers. Spatial Priors (…
Video scene parsing in the wild with diverse scenarios is a challenging and great significance task, especially with the rapid development of automatic driving technique. The dataset Video Scene Parsing in the Wild(VSPW) contains well-trimmed long-temporal, dense annotation and high resolution clips. Based on VSPW, we design a Temporal Bilateral Network with Vision Transformer. We first design a spatial path with convolutions to generate low level features which can preserve the spatial information. Meanwhile, a context path with vision transformer is employed to obtain sufficient context info…
