Papers › Global Context Vision Transformers

Global Context Vision Transformers

20 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.09959archive 2025-07-28

Ali Hatamizadeh, Hongxu Yin, Greg Heinrich, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

We propose global context vision transformer (GC ViT), a novel architecture that enhances parameter and compute utilization for computer vision. Our method leverages global context self-attention modules, joint with standard local self-attention, to effectively and efficiently model both long and short-range spatial interactions, without the need for expensive operations such as computing attention masks or shifting local windows. In addition, we address the lack of the inductive bias in ViTs, and propose to leverage a modified fused inverted residual blocks in our architecture. Our proposed GC ViT achieves state-of-the-art results across image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On ImageNet-1K dataset for classification, the variants of GC ViT with 51M, 90M and 201M parameters achieve 84.3%, 85.0% and 85.7% Top-1 accuracy, respectively, at 224 image resolution and without any pre-training, hence surpassing comparably-sized prior art such as CNN-based ConvNeXt and ViT-based MaxViT and Swin Transformer by a large margin. Pre-trained GC ViT backbones in downstream tasks of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation using MS COCO and ADE20K datasets outperform prior work consistently. Specifically, GC ViT with a 4-scale DINO detection head achieves a box AP of 58.3 on MS COCO dataset.

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Tasks

Image ClassificationInductive BiasInstance SegmentationObject DetectionSegmentationSemantic Segmentationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-B GFLOPs 14.8 #312 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-B Number of params 90M #312 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-B Top 1 Accuracy 84.5% #312 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-S GFLOPs 8.5 #368 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-S Number of params 51M #368 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-S Top 1 Accuracy 84.0% #368 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-T GFLOPs 4.7 #430 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-T Number of params 28M #430 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-T Top 1 Accuracy 83.4% #430 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-XT GFLOPs 2.6 #582 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-XT Number of params 20M #582 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-XT Top 1 Accuracy 82.0% #582 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-XXT GFLOPs 2.1 #740 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-XXT Number of params 12M #740 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet GC ViT-XXT Top 1 Accuracy 79.8% #740 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-B GFLOPs (512 x 512) 1348 #140 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-B Params (M) 125 #140 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-B Validation mIoU 49 #140 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-S GFLOPs (512 x 512) 1163 #149 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-S Params (M) 84 #149 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-S Validation mIoU 48.3 #149 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-T GFLOPs (512 x 512) 947 #175 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-T Params (M) 58 #175 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K GC ViT-T Validation mIoU 46.5 #175 of 235 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBASEBPEConvNeXtDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxStochastic DepthSwin TransformerTransformerVision Transformer

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