# CMT: Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 310 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 310)

- [Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12454/) (2022)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [How Do Vision Transformers Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06709/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01191/) (2022)
- [Visual Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/) (2022)
- [Patches Are All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09792/) (2022)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [FLatten Transformer: Vision Transformer using Focused Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00442/) (2023)
- [FastViT: A Fast Hybrid Vision Transformer using Structural Reparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14189/) (2023)
- [PlainMamba: Improving Non-Hierarchical Mamba in Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17695/) (2024)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [RepViT: Revisiting Mobile CNN From ViT Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09283/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Vision Transformers for MobileNet Size and Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08059/) (2022)
- [ConvMAE: Masked Convolution Meets Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03892/) (2022)
- [PyramidCLIP: Hierarchical Feature Alignment for Vision-language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14095/) (2022)
- [Spike-driven Transformer V2: Meta Spiking Neural Network Architecture Inspiring the Design of Next-generation Neuromorphic Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03663/) (2024)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV4 -- Universal Models for the Mobile Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10518/) (2024)
- [Vision Transformers provably learn spatial structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09221/) (2022)
- [CompletionFormer: Depth Completion with Convolutions and Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13030/) (2023)
- [Shunted Self-Attention via Multi-Scale Token Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15193/) (2021)
- [MedViT: A Robust Vision Transformer for Generalized Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09462/) (2023)
- [Practical Blind Image Denoising via Swin-Conv-UNet and Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13278/) (2022)
- [SiMBA: Simplified Mamba-Based Architecture for Vision and Multivariate Time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15360/) (2024)
- [Conv2Former: A Simple Transformer-Style ConvNet for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11943/) (2022)
- [One-for-All: Bridge the Gap Between Heterogeneous Architectures in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19444/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Applications of Transformers for Deep Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07303/) (2023)
- [RMT: Retentive Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11523/) (2023)
- [Fusion-Mamba for Cross-modality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09146/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision transformers have been successfully applied to image recognition tasks due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies within an image. However, there are still gaps in both performance and computational cost between transformers and existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we aim to address this issue and develop a network that can outperform not only the canonical transformers, but also the high-performance convolutional models. We propose a new transformer based hybrid network by taking advantage of transformers to capture long-range dependencies, and of CNNs to model local features. Furthermore, we scale it to obtain a family of models, called CMTs, obtaining much better accuracy and efficiency than previous convolution and transformer based models. In particular, our CMT-S achieves 83.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, while being 14x and 2x smaller on FLOPs than the existing DeiT and EfficientNet, respectively. The proposed CMT-S also generalizes well on CIFAR10 (99.2%), CIFAR100 (91.7%), Flowers (98.7%), and other challenging vision datasets such as COCO (44.3% mAP), with considerably less computational cost.