{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/acc-unet-a-completely-convolutional-unet","title":"ACC-UNet: A Completely Convolutional UNet model for the 2020s","arxiv_id":"2308.13680","date":"2023-08-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nabil Ibtehaz","Daisuke Kihara"],"abstract":"This decade is marked by the introduction of Vision Transformer, a radical paradigm shift in broad computer vision. A similar trend is followed in medical imaging, UNet, one of the most influential architectures, has been redesigned with transformers. Recently, the efficacy of convolutional models in vision is being reinvestigated by seminal works such as ConvNext, which elevates a ResNet to Swin Transformer level. Deriving inspiration from this, we aim to improve a purely convolutional UNet model so that it can be on par with the transformer-based models, e.g, Swin-Unet or UCTransNet. We examined several advantages of the transformer-based UNet models, primarily long-range dependencies and cross-level skip connections. We attempted to emulate them through convolution operations and thus propose, ACC-UNet, a completely convolutional UNet model that brings the best of both worlds, the inherent inductive biases of convnets with the design decisions of transformers. ACC-UNet was evaluated on 5 different medical image segmentation benchmarks and consistently outperformed convnets, transformers, and their hybrids. Notably, ACC-UNet outperforms state-of-the-art models Swin-Unet and UCTransNet by $2.64 \\pm 2.54\\%$ and $0.45 \\pm 1.61\\%$ in terms of dice score, respectively, while using a fraction of their parameters ($59.26\\%$ and $24.24\\%$). Our codes are available at https://github.com/kiharalab/ACC-UNet.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13680v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.13680v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"acc-unet-a-completely-convolutional-unet","repo_url":"https://github.com/kiharalab/acc-unet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"medical-image-segmentation","task_name":"Medical Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"bottleneck-residual-block","method_name":"Bottleneck Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"channel-wise-cross-attention","method_name":"Channel-wise Cross Attention"},{"method_slug":"channel-wise-cross-fusion-transformer","method_name":"Channel-wise Cross Fusion Transformer"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"instance-normalization","method_name":"Instance Normalization"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sigmoid-activation","method_name":"Sigmoid Activation"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"stochastic-depth","method_name":"Stochastic Depth"},{"method_slug":"swin-transformer","method_name":"Swin Transformer"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"},{"method_slug":"uctransnet","method_name":"UCTransNet"},{"method_slug":"vision-transformer","method_name":"Vision Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2308.13680","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}