Papers › Scalable Vision Transformers with Hierarchical Pooling

Scalable Vision Transformers with Hierarchical Pooling

19 Mar 2021ICCV 2021 10arXiv:2103.10619archive 2025-07-28

Zizheng Pan, Bohan Zhuang, Jing Liu, Haoyu He, Jianfei Cai

The recently proposed Visual image Transformers (ViT) with pure attention have achieved promising performance on image recognition tasks, such as image classification. However, the routine of the current ViT model is to maintain a full-length patch sequence during inference, which is redundant and lacks hierarchical representation. To this end, we propose a Hierarchical Visual Transformer (HVT) which progressively pools visual tokens to shrink the sequence length and hence reduces the computational cost, analogous to the feature maps downsampling in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). It brings a great benefit that we can increase the model capacity by scaling dimensions of depth/width/resolution/patch size without introducing extra computational complexity due to the reduced sequence length. Moreover, we empirically find that the average pooled visual tokens contain more discriminative information than the single class token. To demonstrate the improved scalability of our HVT, we conduct extensive experiments on the image classification task. With comparable FLOPs, our HVT outperforms the competitive baselines on ImageNet and CIFAR-100 datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/MonashAI/HVT

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MonashAI/HVT officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
BR-IDL/PaddleViT mentioned on GitHubpaddleApache-2.0 report

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Tasks

Efficient ViTsImage Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Efficient ViTs ImageNet-1K (with DeiT-S) HVT-S-1 GFLOPs 2.7 #38 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Efficient ViTs ImageNet-1K (with DeiT-S) HVT-S-1 Top 1 Accuracy 78.3 #38 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Efficient ViTs ImageNet-1K (with DeiT-T) HVT-Ti-1 GFLOPs 0.6 #22 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Efficient ViTs ImageNet-1K (with DeiT-T) HVT-Ti-1 Top 1 Accuracy 69.6 #22 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet HVT-S-1 GFLOPs 2.4 #857 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet HVT-S-1 Number of params 21.74M #857 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet HVT-S-1 Top 1 Accuracy 78.00% #857 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet HVT-Ti-1 GFLOPs 0.64 #1026 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet HVT-Ti-1 Number of params 5.74M #1026 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet HVT-Ti-1 Top 1 Accuracy 69.64% #1026 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

AttentionLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionSoftmax

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