Papers › ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

8 Oct 2019CVPR 2020 6arXiv:1910.03151archive 2025-07-28

Qilong Wang, Banggu Wu, Pengfei Zhu, Peihua Li, WangMeng Zuo, QinGhua Hu

Recently, channel attention mechanism has demonstrated to offer great potential in improving the performance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most existing methods dedicate to developing more sophisticated attention modules for achieving better performance, which inevitably increase model complexity. To overcome the paradox of performance and complexity trade-off, this paper proposes an Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module, which only involves a handful of parameters while bringing clear performance gain. By dissecting the channel attention module in SENet, we empirically show avoiding dimensionality reduction is important for learning channel attention, and appropriate cross-channel interaction can preserve performance while significantly decreasing model complexity. Therefore, we propose a local cross-channel interaction strategy without dimensionality reduction, which can be efficiently implemented via 1D convolution. Furthermore, we develop a method to adaptively select kernel size of 1D convolution, determining coverage of local cross-channel interaction. The proposed ECA module is efficient yet effective, e.g., the parameters and computations of our modules against backbone of ResNet50 are 80 vs. 24.37M and 4.7e-4 GFLOPs vs. 3.86 GFLOPs, respectively, and the performance boost is more than 2% in terms of Top-1 accuracy. We extensively evaluate our ECA module on image classification, object detection and instance segmentation with backbones of ResNets and MobileNetV2. The experimental results show our module is more efficient while performing favorably against its counterparts.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

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

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="1910.03151")

Code

Syntology Ran 1 of 8 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 7 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong.

By repository: official repository: 8 samples from 1 repository, 1 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

13 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

BangguWu/ECANet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
JinLi711/Convolution_Variants mentioned on GitHubtf report
e96031413/AA-YOLO mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
e96031413/PyTorch_YOLOv4-tiny mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mnikitin/channel-attention mentioned on GitHubmxnet report
rwightman/pytorch-image-models mentioned on GitHubpytorch 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

8 samples harvested; 1 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 7 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · our draft was wrong
7unverified

Licence: 0 of the 8 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from BangguWu/ECANet. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

conv3x3 BangguWu/ECANet/models/eca_resnet.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · fac5364e2f53c6db · report
accuracy BangguWu/ECANet/light_main.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 80752954f2a868b8 · report
clever_format BangguWu/ECANet/paras_flops.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 4f5864c4b2375362 · report
eca_mobilenet_v2 BangguWu/ECANet/models/eca_mobilenetv2.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 28bd295d6e3e6606 · report
eca_resnet18 BangguWu/ECANet/models/eca_resnet.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · f6ab2bc32991ac5c · report
eca_resnet34 BangguWu/ECANet/models/eca_resnet.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 05f5ff944e3e67da · report
train BangguWu/ECANet/light_main.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · aae02ce712945919 · report
validate BangguWu/ECANet/light_main.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 78bcedada2ecc6df · report

Tasks

Dimensionality ReductionImage ClassificationInstance SegmentationObject DetectionSemantic Segmentationimage-classificationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-152) GFLOPs 10.83 #798 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-152) Number of params 57.40M #798 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-152) Top 1 Accuracy 78.92% #798 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-101) GFLOPs 7.35 #814 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-101) Number of params 42.49M #814 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-101) Top 1 Accuracy 78.65% #814 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-50) GFLOPs 3.86 #874 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-50) Number of params 24.37M #874 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (ResNet-50) Top 1 Accuracy 77.48% #874 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (MobileNetV2) GFLOPs 0.320 #994 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (MobileNetV2) Number of params 3.34M #994 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ECA-Net (MobileNetV2) Top 1 Accuracy 72.56% #994 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection DSEC ECANet mAP 25.7 #9 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection PKU-DDD17-Car ECANet mAP50 82.2 #5 of 14 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: ECANet

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConvolutionDense ConnectionsDepthwise ConvolutionDepthwise Separable ConvolutionECA-NetECANetEfficient Channel AttentionFPNFaster R-CNNFocal LossGlobal Average PoolingInverted Residual BlockKaiming InitializationMask R-CNNMax PoolingPointwise ConvolutionRPNRandom Horizontal FlipRandom Resized CropReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionRetinaNetRoIAlignRoIPoolSENetSGD with MomentumSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxSqueeze-and-Excitation BlockStep DecayWeight Decay

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