Papers › DeepViT: Towards Deeper Vision Transformer

DeepViT: Towards Deeper Vision Transformer

22 Mar 2021arXiv:2103.11886archive 2025-07-28

Daquan Zhou, Bingyi Kang, Xiaojie Jin, Linjie Yang, Xiaochen Lian, Zihang Jiang, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng

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 of deep ViT models. This fact demonstrates that in deeper layers of ViTs, the self-attention mechanism fails to learn effective concepts for representation learning and hinders the model from getting expected performance gain. Based on above observation, we propose a simple yet effective method, named Re-attention, to re-generate the attention maps to increase their diversity at different layers with negligible computation and memory cost. The pro-posed method makes it feasible to train deeper ViT models with consistent performance improvements via minor modification to existing ViT models. Notably, when training a deep ViT model with 32 transformer blocks, the Top-1 classification accuracy can be improved by 1.6% on ImageNet. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhoudaquan/dvit_repo.

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Tasks

Image ClassificationRepresentation Learningimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet DeepVit-L* (DeiT training recipe) Top 1 Accuracy 83.1% #463 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet DeepVit-L Number of params 55M #567 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet DeepVit-L Top 1 Accuracy 82.2% #567 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Introduced by this paper: DeepViT

ConvolutionDeepViTRe-Attention Module

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