# BA^2M: A Batch Aware Attention Module for Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15099 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15099/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [BAM: Bottleneck Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06514/) (2018)
- [Drop an Octave: Reducing Spatial Redundancy in Convolutional Neural Networks with Octave Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05049/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Sentiment-oriented Transformer-based Variational Autoencoder Network for Live Video Commenting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12782/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised New Event Type Induction and Description via Contrastive Loss-Enforced Batch Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05943/) (2022)
- [A Single Graph Convolution Is All You Need: Efficient Grayscale Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00564/) (2024)
- [CSA-Net: Channel-wise Spatially Autocorrelated Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05755/) (2024)
- [CycleSL: Server-Client Cyclical Update Driven Scalable Split Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18611/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The attention mechanisms have been employed in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to enhance the feature representation. However, existing attention mechanisms only concentrate on refining the features inside each sample and neglect the discrimination between different samples. In this paper, we propose a batch aware attention module (BA2M) for feature enrichment from a distinctive perspective. More specifically, we first get the sample-wise attention representation (SAR) by fusing the channel, local spatial and global spatial attention maps within each sample. Then, we feed the SARs of the whole batch to a normalization function to get the weights for each sample. The weights serve to distinguish the features' importance between samples in a training batch with different complexity of content. The BA2M could be embedded into different parts of CNN and optimized with the network in an end-to-end manner. The design of BA2M is lightweight with few extra parameters and calculations. We validate BA2M through extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K for the image recognition task. The results show that BA2M can boost the performance of various network architectures and outperforms many classical attention methods. Besides, BA2M exceeds traditional methods of re-weighting samples based on the loss value.