Papers › Retina Vision Transformer (RetinaViT): Introducing Scaled Patches into Vision Transformers

Retina Vision Transformer (RetinaViT): Introducing Scaled Patches into Vision Transformers

20 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.13677archive 2025-07-28

Yuyang Shu, Michael E. Bain

Humans see low and high spatial frequency components at the same time, and combine the information from both to form a visual scene. Drawing on this neuroscientific inspiration, we propose an altered Vision Transformer architecture where patches from scaled down versions of the input image are added to the input of the first Transformer Encoder layer. We name this model Retina Vision Transformer (RetinaViT) due to its inspiration from the human visual system. Our experiments show that when trained on the ImageNet-1K dataset with a moderate configuration, RetinaViT achieves a 3.3% performance improvement over the original ViT. We hypothesize that this improvement can be attributed to the inclusion of low spatial frequency components in the input, which improves the ability to capture structural features, and to select and forward important features to deeper layers. RetinaViT thereby opens doors to further investigations into vertical pathways and attention patterns.

PaperPDFCode

Code

yuyangshu/retinavit officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubjaxApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerVision Transformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections