Papers › Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions

Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions

17 May 2022arXiv:2205.08534archive 2025-07-28

Zhe Chen, Yuchen Duan, Wenhai Wang, Junjun He, Tong Lu, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao

This work investigates a simple yet powerful dense prediction task adapter for Vision Transformer (ViT). Unlike recently advanced variants that incorporate vision-specific inductive biases into their architectures, the plain ViT suffers inferior performance on dense predictions due to weak prior assumptions. To address this issue, we propose the ViT-Adapter, which allows plain ViT to achieve comparable performance to vision-specific transformers. Specifically, the backbone in our framework is a plain ViT that can learn powerful representations from large-scale multi-modal data. When transferring to downstream tasks, a pre-training-free adapter is used to introduce the image-related inductive biases into the model, making it suitable for these tasks. We verify ViT-Adapter on multiple dense prediction tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Notably, without using extra detection data, our ViT-Adapter-L yields state-of-the-art 60.9 box AP and 53.0 mask AP on COCO test-dev. We hope that the ViT-Adapter could serve as an alternative for vision-specific transformers and facilitate future research. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/czczup/ViT-Adapter.

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Code

czczup/vit-adapter officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
chenller/mmseg-extension mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Instance SegmentationObject DetectionPanoptic SegmentationReal-Time Object DetectionSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Instance Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiTv2, O365, multi-scale) mask AP 54.2 #7 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiTv2 pretrain, multi-scale) mask AP 52.5 #14 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiT pretrain, multi-scale) mask AP 52.2 #15 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO test-dev ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiTv2, O365, multi-scale) mask AP 54.5 #8 of 112 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO test-dev ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiTv2 pretrain, multi-scale) mask AP 53.0 #13 of 112 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO test-dev ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiT pretrain, multi-scale) mask AP 52.5 #15 of 112 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiTv2 pretrain, multi-scale) box AP 60.5 #22 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiT pretrain, multi-scale) box AP 60.2 #26 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiTv2 pretrain, multi-scale) box mAP 60.9 #25 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO test-dev ViT-Adapter-L (HTC++, BEiT pretrain, multi-scale) box mAP 60.4 #28 of 225 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO-O ViT-Adapter (BEiTv2-L) Average mAP 34.25 #11 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO-O ViT-Adapter (BEiTv2-L) Effective Robustness 7.79 #11 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Panoptic Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (single-scale, BEiTv2 pretrain, Mask2Former) AP 48.9 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Panoptic Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (single-scale, BEiTv2 pretrain, Mask2Former) PQ 58.4 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Panoptic Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (single-scale, BEiTv2 pretrain, Mask2Former) PQst 48.4 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Panoptic Segmentation COCO minival ViT-Adapter-L (single-scale, BEiTv2 pretrain, Mask2Former) PQth 65.0 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiTv2 pretrain) Params (M) 571 #8 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiTv2 pretrain) Validation mIoU 61.5 #8 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiT pretrain) Params (M) 571 #12 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiT pretrain) Validation mIoU 60.5 #12 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K ViT-Adapter-L (UperNet, BEiT pretrain) Params (M) 451 #19 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K ViT-Adapter-L (UperNet, BEiT pretrain) Validation mIoU 58.4 #19 of 235 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K val ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiT pretrain) mIoU 60.5 #7 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K val ViT-Adapter-L (UperNet, BEiT pretrain) mIoU 58.4 #10 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes test ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiT pretrain) Mean IoU (class) 85.2% #6 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes val ViT-Adapter-L mIoU 85.8 #10 of 99 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation PASCAL Context ViT-Adapter-L (Mask2Former, BEiT pretrain) mIoU 68.2 #5 of 66 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation PASCAL Context ViT-Adapter-L (UperNet, BEiT pretrain) mIoU 67.5 #6 of 66 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

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

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