# CAT: Cross Attention in Vision Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05786 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05786/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [CrossFormer: A Versatile Vision Transformer Hinging on Cross-scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00154/) (2021)
- [SwinNet: Swin Transformer drives edge-aware RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05585/) (2022)
- [3Mformer: Multi-order Multi-mode Transformer for Skeletal Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14474/) (2023)
- [Cascade Transformers for End-to-End Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09642/) (2022)
- [Beyond Fixation: Dynamic Window Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12856/) (2022)
- [BiTr-Unet: a CNN-Transformer Combined Network for MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12271/) (2021)
- [CrossFormer++: A Versatile Vision Transformer Hinging on Cross-scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06908/) (2023)
- [HarmoniCa: Harmonizing Training and Inference for Better Feature Caching in Diffusion Transformer Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01723/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion-Based Feature Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05352/) (2025)
- [Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19294/) (2025)
- [3DSGrasp: 3D Shape-Completion for Robotic Grasp](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00866/) (2023)
- [Motion meets Attention: Video Motion Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03179/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Text-to-Image Editing via Cache-Enabled Sparse Diffusion Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17423/) (2023)
- [Low-bit Model Quantization for Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05530/) (2025)
- [Erasing Concepts, Steering Generations: A Comprehensive Survey of Concept Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19398/) (2025)
- [Learning Cross-Image Object Semantic Relation in Transformer for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00784/) (2022)
- [Reasoning to Edit: Hypothetical Instruction-Based Image Editing with Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01908/) (2025)
- [Towards Simultaneous Segmentation of Liver Tumors and Intrahepatic Vessels via Cross-attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09785/) (2023)
- [ESTformer: Transformer utilising spatiotemporal dependencies for electroencephalogram super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10052/) (2023)
- [BackdoorDM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Backdoor Learning on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11798/) (2025)
- [ESIQA: Perceptual Quality Assessment of Vision-Pro-based Egocentric Spatial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21363/) (2024)
- [Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Robust Cloud Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13127/) (2024)
- [Guard Me If You Know Me: Protecting Specific Face-Identity from Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19582/) (2025)
- [Alternative Telescopic Displacement: An Efficient Multimodal Alignment Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16950/) (2023)
- [Refusing Safe Prompts for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09050/) (2024)
- [Factorization Vision Transformer: Modeling Long Range Dependency with Local Window Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08614/) (2023)
- [Zoom and Shift are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08866/) (2024)
- [Complementary Advantages: Exploiting Cross-Field Frequency Correlation for NIR-Assisted Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16645/) (2024)
- [BeamLLM: Vision-Empowered mmWave Beam Prediction with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10432/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since Transformer has found widespread use in NLP, the potential of Transformer in CV has been realized and has inspired many new approaches. However, the computation required for replacing word tokens with image patches for Transformer after the tokenization of the image is vast(e.g., ViT), which bottlenecks model training and inference. In this paper, we propose a new attention mechanism in Transformer termed Cross Attention, which alternates attention inner the image patch instead of the whole image to capture local information and apply attention between image patches which are divided from single-channel feature maps capture global information. Both operations have less computation than standard self-attention in Transformer. By alternately applying attention inner patch and between patches, we implement cross attention to maintain the performance with lower computational cost and build a hierarchical network called Cross Attention Transformer(CAT) for other vision tasks. Our base model achieves state-of-the-arts on ImageNet-1K, and improves the performance of other methods on COCO and ADE20K, illustrating that our network has the potential to serve as general backbones. The code and models are available at urlhttps://github.com/linhezheng19/CAT.