{"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/less-is-more-pay-less-attention-in-vision","title":"Less is More: Pay Less Attention in Vision Transformers","arxiv_id":"2105.14217","date":"2021-05-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zizheng Pan","Bohan Zhuang","Haoyu He","Jing Liu","Jianfei Cai"],"abstract":"Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works can be prohibitively expensive due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention over a long sequence of representations, especially for high-resolution dense prediction tasks. To this end, we present a novel Less attention vIsion Transformer (LIT), building upon the fact that the early self-attention layers in Transformers still focus on local patterns and bring minor benefits in recent hierarchical vision Transformers. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical Transformer where we use pure multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to encode rich local patterns in the early stages while applying self-attention modules to capture longer dependencies in deeper layers. Moreover, we further propose a learned deformable token merging module to adaptively fuse informative patches in a non-uniform manner. The proposed LIT achieves promising performance on image recognition tasks, including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation, serving as a strong backbone for many vision tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhuang-group/LIT","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.14217v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.14217v4.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":"less-is-more-pay-less-attention-in-vision","repo_url":"https://github.com/MonashAI/LIT","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"less-is-more-pay-less-attention-in-vision","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhuang-group/lit","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"instance-segmentation","task_name":"Instance Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-1","task_name":"object-detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"},{"method_slug":"vision-transformer","method_name":"Vision Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2105.14217","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}