Papers › Expectation-Maximization Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentation

Expectation-Maximization Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentation

31 Jul 2019ICCV 2019 10arXiv:1907.13426archive 2025-07-28

Xia Li, Zhisheng Zhong, Jianlong Wu, Yibo Yang, Zhouchen Lin, Hong Liu

Self-attention mechanism has been widely used for various tasks. It is designed to compute the representation of each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions. Thus, it can capture long-range relations for computer vision tasks. However, it is computationally consuming. Since the attention maps are computed w.r.t all other positions. In this paper, we formulate the attention mechanism into an expectation-maximization manner and iteratively estimate a much more compact set of bases upon which the attention maps are computed. By a weighted summation upon these bases, the resulting representation is low-rank and deprecates noisy information from the input. The proposed Expectation-Maximization Attention (EMA) module is robust to the variance of input and is also friendly in memory and computation. Moreover, we set up the bases maintenance and normalization methods to stabilize its training procedure. We conduct extensive experiments on popular semantic segmentation benchmarks including PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context and COCO Stuff, on which we set new records.

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Code

hendraet/synthesis-in-style mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
XiaLiPKU/EMANet pytorchGPL-3.0 report
open-mmlab/mmsegmentation pytorchApache-2.0 report

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Tasks

Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semantic Segmentation BDD100K val EMANet mIoU 61.4 #7 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation COCO-Stuff test EMANet mIoU 39.9% #13 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation PASCAL Context EMANet mIoU 53.1 #44 of 66 Archive leaderboard report

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