# ViTOL: Vision Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06772 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06772/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10758/) (2018)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [Explaining NonLinear Classification Decisions with Deep Taylor Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02479/) (2015)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Layer-wise Relevance Propagation for Neural Networks with Local Renormalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00825/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [TS-CAM: Token Semantic Coupled Attention Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14862/) (2021)
- [Self-produced Guidance for Weakly-supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08902/) (2018)
- [Inter-Image Communication for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05096/) (2020)
- [Unveiling the Potential of Structure Preserving for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04523/) (2021)
- [Understanding Individual Decisions of CNNs via Contrastive Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02100/) (2018)
- [ContextLocNet: Context-Aware Deep Network Models for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04331/) (2016)
- [Geometry Constrained Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09727/) (2020)
- [Evaluation for Weakly Supervised Object Localization: Protocol, Metrics, and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04178/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization Using Size Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04314/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ProtoPFormer: Concentrating on Prototypical Parts in Vision Transformers for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10431/) (2022)
- [Discriminative Sampling of Proposals in Self-Supervised Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09209/) (2022)
- [Re-Attention Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01838/) (2022)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation of Weakly-Supervised Object Localization Models for Histology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19113/) (2024)
- [Interpretability-Aware Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08035/) (2023)
- [DiPS: Discriminative Pseudo-Label Sampling with Self-Supervised Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06196/) (2023)
- [Top-Down Framework for Weakly-supervised Grounded Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07490/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization with Representer Point Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04172/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization in Unconstrained Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06018/) (2024)
- [Edge Attention Module for Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03103/) (2025)
- [Pro2SAM: Mask Prompt to SAM with Grid Points for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04905/) (2025)
- [What-Where Transformer: A Slot-Centric Visual Backbone for Concurrent Representation and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12021/) (2026)
- [WSPolypNet: Weakly Supervised Polyp Localization in Colonoscopy Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08182/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims at predicting object locations in an image using only image-level category labels. Common challenges that image classification models encounter when localizing objects are, (a) they tend to look at the most discriminative features in an image that confines the localization map to a very small region, (b) the localization maps are class agnostic, and the models highlight objects of multiple classes in the same image and, (c) the localization performance is affected by background noise. To alleviate the above challenges we introduce the following simple changes through our proposed method ViTOL. We leverage the vision-based transformer for self-attention and introduce a patch-based attention dropout layer (p-ADL) to increase the coverage of the localization map and a gradient attention rollout mechanism to generate class-dependent attention maps. We conduct extensive quantitative, qualitative and ablation experiments on the ImageNet-1K and CUB datasets. We achieve state-of-the-art MaxBoxAcc-V2 localization scores of 70.47% and 73.17% on the two datasets respectively. Code is available on https://github.com/Saurav-31/ViTOL