Papers › Refiner: Refining Self-attention for Vision Transformers
Refiner: Refining Self-attention for Vision Transformers
Daquan Zhou, Yujun Shi, Bingyi Kang, Weihao Yu, Zihang Jiang, Yuan Li, Xiaojie Jin, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown competitive accuracy in image classification tasks compared with CNNs. Yet, they generally require much more data for model pre-training. Most of recent works thus are dedicated to designing more complex architectures or training methods to address the data-efficiency issue of ViTs. However, few of them explore improving the self-attention mechanism, a key factor distinguishing ViTs from CNNs. Different from existing works, we introduce a conceptually simple scheme, called refiner, to directly refine the self-attention maps of ViTs. Specifically, refiner explores attention expansion that projects the multi-head attention maps to a higher-dimensional space to promote their diversity. Further, refiner applies convolutions to augment local patterns of the attention maps, which we show is equivalent to a distributed local attention features are aggregated locally with learnable kernels and then globally aggregated with self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that refiner works surprisingly well. Significantly, it enables ViTs to achieve 86% top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet with only 81M parameters.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Classification | ImageNet | Refiner-ViT-L | Number of params | 81M | #175 of 1060 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Classification | ImageNet | Refiner-ViT-L | Top 1 Accuracy | 86.03 | #175 of 1060 | 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
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