The DOI matches its Crossref record; 97 of the 97 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Beyond Self-Attention: External Attention Using Two Linear Layers for Visual Tasks
Open accessAbstract
Attention mechanisms, especially self-attention, have played an increasingly important role in deep feature representation for visual tasks. Self-attention updates the feature at each position by computing a weighted sum of features using pair-wise affinities across all positions to capture the long-range dependency within a single sample. However, self-attention has quadratic complexity and ignores potential correlation between different samples. This article proposes a novel attention mechanism which we call external attention, based on two external, small, learnable, shared memories, which can be implemented easily by simply using two cascaded linear layers and two normalization layers; it conveniently replaces self-attention in existing popular architectures. External attention has linear complexity and implicitly considers the correlations between all data samples. We further incorporate the multi-head mechanism into external attention to provide an all-MLP architecture, external attention MLP (EAMLP), for image classification. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, image generation, and point cloud analysis reveal that our method provides results comparable or superior to the self-attention mechanism and some of its variants, with much lower computational and memory costs.
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Citations
Cites
Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
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Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks
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BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
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Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks
Ren, S., He, K., Girshick, R., & Sun, J. (2015) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1506.01497 · Cited by 70,812
ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database
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BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
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Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows
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Self-citationBatch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift
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The pascal visual object classes (VOC) challenge
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Cited by
Han (2023) · doi:10.1109/tpami.2022.3152247 · Cited by 4,682
Attention mechanisms in computer vision: A survey
Guo, M.-H., Xu, T.-X., Liu, J.-J., Liu, Z.-N., Jiang, P.-T., Mu, T.-J., Zhang, S.-H., Martin, R. R., Cheng, M.-M., & Hu, S.-M. (2022) · Computational Visual Media · doi:10.1007/s41095-022-0271-y · Cited by 2,566
“EANet [75] proposes that self-attention should only consider correlation in a single sample and should ignore potential relationships between different samples.”
BackgroundSelf-citationGenerative Artificial Intelligence in Anatomic Pathology
Brodsky, V., Ullah, E., Bychkov, A., Song, A. H., Walk, E. E., Louis, P., Rasool, G., Singh, R. S., Mahmood, F., Bui, M. M., et al. (2025) · Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine · doi:10.5858/arpa.2024-0215-ra · Cited by 48
Soft Error Reliability Analysis of Vision Transformers
Xue, X., Liu, C., Wang, Y., Yang, B., Luo, T., Zhang, L., Li, H., & Li, X. (2023) · IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems · doi:10.1109/tvlsi.2023.3317138 · Cited by 35
“Motivated by the success of ViT [1], numerous variants have been proposed to improve ViTs from different angles such as novel training strategies [2], [3], effective self-attention mechanisms [4], [5], and combining with classical neural network layers [6], [7], [8].”
Method
Metadata
- Authors
- Guo, M.-H., Liu, Z.-N., Mu, T.-J., & Hu, S.-M.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
- Published
- 2022
- Volume
- 45
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1-13
- ISSN
- 0162-8828 (ISSN-L)
- 2160-9292
- 1939-3539
- OpenAlex
- W4302275239
- Cited by
- 668
- References
- 97
- FWCI
- 49.05
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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