# Visual Attention Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09741 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/

## Key facts

- Cited by 210 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 106 of its 132 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 106)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 210)

- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [DaViT: Dual Attention Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03645/) (2022)
- [MambaOut: Do We Really Need Mamba for Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07992/) (2024)
- [More ConvNets in the 2020s: Scaling up Kernels Beyond 51x51 using Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03620/) (2022)
- [MetaFormer Baselines for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13452/) (2022)
- [ViTAEv2: Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring Inductive Bias for Image Recognition and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10108/) (2022)
- [Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01480/) (2023)
- [Towards An End-to-End Framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02663/) (2022)
- [HorNet: Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions with Recursive Gated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14284/) (2022)
- [Large Selective Kernel Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09030/) (2023)
- [Designing BERT for Convolutional Networks: Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03580/) (2023)
- [Temporal Attention Unit: Towards Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12126/) (2022)
- [InceptionNeXt: When Inception Meets ConvNeXt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16900/) (2023)
- [Conv2Former: A Simple Transformer-Style ConvNet for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11943/) (2022)
- [Fast Vision Transformers with HiLo Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13213/) (2022)
- [Wavelet Convolutions for Large Receptive Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05848/) (2024)
- [Masked Image Modeling Advances 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11716/) (2022)
- [RMT: Retentive Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11523/) (2023)
- [DFormer: Rethinking RGBD Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09668/) (2023)
- [MogaNet: Multi-order Gated Aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03295/) (2022)
- [Spatially-Adaptive Feature Modulation for Efficient Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13800/) (2023)
- [Rewrite the Stars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19967/) (2024)
- [OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11249/) (2023)
- [Poly Kernel Inception Network for Remote Sensing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06258/) (2024)
- [Scale-Aware Modulation Meet Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08579/) (2023)
- [QuEST: Low-bit Diffusion Model Quantization via Efficient Selective Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03666/) (2024)
- [SARDet-100K: Towards Open-Source Benchmark and ToolKit for Large-Scale SAR Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06534/) (2024)
- [Frequency-Assisted Mamba for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04964/) (2024)
- [DarkIR: Robust Low-Light Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13443/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three challenges for applying self-attention in computer vision. (1) Treating images as 1D sequences neglects their 2D structures. (2) The quadratic complexity is too expensive for high-resolution images. (3) It only captures spatial adaptability but ignores channel adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel linear attention named large kernel attention (LKA) to enable self-adaptive and long-range correlations in self-attention while avoiding its shortcomings. Furthermore, we present a neural network based on LKA, namely Visual Attention Network (VAN). While extremely simple, VAN surpasses similar size vision transformers(ViTs) and convolutional neural networks(CNNs) in various tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, pose estimation, etc. For example, VAN-B6 achieves 87.8% accuracy on ImageNet benchmark and set new state-of-the-art performance (58.2 PQ) for panoptic segmentation. Besides, VAN-B2 surpasses Swin-T 4% mIoU (50.1 vs. 46.1) for semantic segmentation on ADE20K benchmark, 2.6% AP (48.8 vs. 46.2) for object detection on COCO dataset. It provides a novel method and a simple yet strong baseline for the community. Code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network.