Papers › Conv2Former: A Simple Transformer-Style ConvNet for Visual Recognition

Conv2Former: A Simple Transformer-Style ConvNet for Visual Recognition

22 Nov 2022arXiv:2211.11943archive 2025-07-28

Qibin Hou, Cheng-Ze Lu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Jiashi Feng

This paper does not attempt to design a state-of-the-art method for visual recognition but investigates a more efficient way to make use of convolutions to encode spatial features. By comparing the design principles of the recent convolutional neural networks ConvNets) and Vision Transformers, we propose to simplify the self-attention by leveraging a convolutional modulation operation. We show that such a simple approach can better take advantage of the large kernels (>=7x7) nested in convolutional layers. We build a family of hierarchical ConvNets using the proposed convolutional modulation, termed Conv2Former. Our network is simple and easy to follow. Experiments show that our Conv2Former outperforms existent popular ConvNets and vision Transformers, like Swin Transformer and ConvNeXt in all ImageNet classification, COCO object detection and ADE20k semantic segmentation.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

hvision-nku/conv2former officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Object DetectionSemantic Segmentationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEConvNeXtDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxStochastic DepthSwin TransformerTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections