# Efficient Representation Learning via Adaptive Context Pooling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01844 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01844/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Sparse Sinkhorn Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11296/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [Blockwise Self-Attention for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02972/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Attention Span in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07799/) (2019)
- [Character-Level Language Modeling with Deeper Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04444/) (2018)
- [Modeling Localness for Self-Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10182/) (2018)
- [BP-Transformer: Modelling Long-Range Context via Binary Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04070/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Manifold Representation of the Key in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00534/) (2024)
- [SAGE: Spatial-visual Adaptive Graph Exploration for Efficient Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25723/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-attention mechanisms model long-range context by using pairwise attention between all input tokens. In doing so, they assume a fixed attention granularity defined by the individual tokens (e.g., text characters or image pixels), which may not be optimal for modeling complex dependencies at higher levels. In this paper, we propose ContextPool to address this problem by adapting the attention granularity for each token. Inspired by the success of ConvNets that are combined with pooling to capture long-range dependencies, we learn to pool neighboring features for each token before computing attention in a given attention layer. The pooling weights and support size are adaptively determined, allowing the pooled features to encode meaningful context with varying scale. We show that ContextPool makes attention models more expressive, achieving strong performance often with fewer layers and thus significantly reduced cost. Experiments validate that our ContextPool module, when plugged into transformer models, matches or surpasses state-of-the-art performance using less compute on several language and image benchmarks, outperforms recent works with learned context sizes or sparse attention patterns, and is also applicable to ConvNets for efficient feature learning.