{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/keep-it-simpool-who-said-supervised","title":"Keep It SimPool: Who Said Supervised Transformers Suffer from Attention Deficit?","arxiv_id":"2309.06891","date":"2023-09-13","proceeding":"ICCV 2023 1","authors":["Bill Psomas","Ioannis Kakogeorgiou","Konstantinos Karantzalos","Yannis Avrithis"],"abstract":"Convolutional networks and vision transformers have different forms of pairwise interactions, pooling across layers and pooling at the end of the network. Does the latter really need to be different? As a by-product of pooling, vision transformers provide spatial attention for free, but this is most often of low quality unless self-supervised, which is not well studied. Is supervision really the problem? In this work, we develop a generic pooling framework and then we formulate a number of existing methods as instantiations. By discussing the properties of each group of methods, we derive SimPool, a simple attention-based pooling mechanism as a replacement of the default one for both convolutional and transformer encoders. We find that, whether supervised or self-supervised, this improves performance on pre-training and downstream tasks and provides attention maps delineating object boundaries in all cases. One could thus call SimPool universal. To our knowledge, we are the first to obtain attention maps in supervised transformers of at least as good quality as self-supervised, without explicit losses or modifying the architecture. Code at: https://github.com/billpsomas/simpool.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06891v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.06891v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"keep-it-simpool-who-said-supervised","repo_url":"https://github.com/billpsomas/simpool","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-retrieval","task_name":"Image Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"metric-learning","task_name":"Metric Learning"},{"task_slug":"object-discovery","task_name":"Object Discovery"},{"task_slug":"object-localization","task_name":"Object Localization"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2309.06891","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2309.06891"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/billpsomas/simpool","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"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"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"47961f7c6cded775","entry":"SimPool","repo":"billpsomas/simpool","repo_kind":"official","path":"sp.py","file_url":"https://github.com/billpsomas/simpool/blob/HEAD/sp.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"47961f7c6cded775"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}