# Boosting Crowd Counting via Multifaceted Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02636 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02636/

## Key facts

- Cited by 73 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Universal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03819/) (2018)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [Focal Self-attention for Local-Global Interactions in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00641/) (2021)
- [CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10062/) (2018)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [Scaling Local Self-Attention for Parameter Efficient Visual Backbones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12731/) (2021)
- [ViTAE: Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring Intrinsic Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03348/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [Composition Loss for Counting, Density Map Estimation and Localization in Dense Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01050/) (2018)
- [Bayesian Loss for Crowd Count Estimation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03684/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Transformer-based Set Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10881/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03360/) (2020)
- [Context-Aware Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10452/) (2018)
- [Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/) (2020)
- [JHU-CROWD++: Large-Scale Crowd Counting Dataset and A Benchmark Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03597/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Adaptive Clustering Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09315/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [CrowdCLIP: Unsupervised Crowd Counting via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04231/) (2023)
- [STEERER: Resolving Scale Variations for Counting and Localization via Selective Inheritance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10468/) (2023)
- [Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13814/) (2023)
- [Exemplar Guided Deep Neural Network for Spatial Transcriptomics Analysis of Gene Expression Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16721/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer Off-the-Shelf: A Surprising Baseline for Few-Shot Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04440/) (2023)
- [Improving Point-based Crowd Counting and Localization Based on Auxiliary Point Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10589/) (2024)
- [Domain-General Crowd Counting in Unseen Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02573/) (2022)
- [CrowdDiff: Multi-hypothesis Crowd Density Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12790/) (2023)
- [Gramformer: Learning Crowd Counting via Graph-Modulated Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03870/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Crowd Counting via Density Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02955/) (2022)
- [Single Domain Generalization for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09124/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Crowd Counting: State-of-the-art, Trends, and Future Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07271/) (2022)
- [Regressor-Segmenter Mutual Prompt Learning for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01711/) (2023)
- [Counting Crowds in Bad Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01209/) (2023)
- [Boosting Detection in Crowd Analysis via Underutilized Output Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16187/) (2023)
- [DAOT: Domain-Agnostically Aligned Optimal Transport for Domain-Adaptive Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05311/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal Crowd Counting via a Broker Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07518/) (2024)
- [RGB-D Indiscernible Object Counting in Underwater Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11677/) (2023)
- [Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Density Guided Adaptive Selection CNN and Transformer Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10075/) (2022)
- [DPA-P2PNet: Deformable Proposal-aware P2PNet for Accurate Point-based Cell Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02602/) (2023)
- [Focus for Free in Density-Based Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05129/) (2023)
- [Learning Discriminative Features for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04509/) (2023)
- [RGB-T Multi-Modal Crowd Counting Based on Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03033/) (2023)
- [Cross-head Supervision for Crowd Counting with Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09245/) (2023)
- [FGENet: Fine-Grained Extraction Network for Congested Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01208/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Counting via Pixel-by-pixel Density Distribution Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15297/) (2024)
- [VMambaCC: A Visual State Space Model for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03978/) (2024)
- [Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting with Contextual Modeling: Facilitating Holistic Understanding of Crowd Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10352/) (2023)
- [Point-to-Region Loss for Semi-Supervised Point-Based Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21943/) (2025)
- [[De|Re]constructing VLMs' Reasoning in Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19555/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper focuses on the challenging crowd counting task. As large-scale variations often exist within crowd images, neither fixed-size convolution kernel of CNN nor fixed-size attention of recent vision transformers can well handle this kind of variation. To address this problem, we propose a Multifaceted Attention Network (MAN) to improve transformer models in local spatial relation encoding. MAN incorporates global attention from a vanilla transformer, learnable local attention, and instance attention into a counting model. Firstly, the local Learnable Region Attention (LRA) is proposed to assign attention exclusively for each feature location dynamically. Secondly, we design the Local Attention Regularization to supervise the training of LRA by minimizing the deviation among the attention for different feature locations. Finally, we provide an Instance Attention mechanism to focus on the most important instances dynamically during training. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets namely ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, JHU++, and NWPU have validated the proposed method. Codes: https://github.com/LoraLinH/Boosting-Crowd-Counting-via-Multifaceted-Attention.