# Re-Attention Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01838 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01838/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Transformer-based Set Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10881/) (2020)
- [Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02312/) (2020)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [TransFG: A Transformer Architecture for Fine-grained Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07976/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Smooth Grad-CAM++: An Enhanced Inference Level Visualization Technique for Deep Convolutional Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01224/) (2019)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07918/) (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)
- [SS-CAM: Smoothed Score-CAM for Sharper Visual Feature Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14255/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [CLIP-Driven Fine-grained Text-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10276/) (2022)
- [Discriminative Sampling of Proposals in Self-Supervised Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09209/) (2022)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation of Weakly-Supervised Object Localization Models for Histology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19113/) (2024)
- [DiPS: Discriminative Pseudo-Label Sampling with Self-Supervised Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06196/) (2023)
- [SASFormer: Transformers for Sparsely Annotated Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02019/) (2022)
- [Text-Guided Mask-free Local Image Retouching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07603/) (2022)
- [Calibrating Undisciplined Over-Smoothing in Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03112/) (2023)
- [Masked Collaborative Contrast for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08491/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization in Unconstrained Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06018/) (2024)
- [Self-Classification Enhancement and Correction for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16294/) (2025)
- [Weakly Supervised Virus Capsid Detection with Image-Level Annotations in Electron Microscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00563/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object localization is a challenging task which aims to localize objects with coarse annotations such as image categories. Existing deep network approaches are mainly based on class activation map, which focuses on highlighting discriminative local region while ignoring the full object. In addition, the emerging transformer-based techniques constantly put a lot of emphasis on the backdrop that impedes the ability to identify complete objects. To address these issues, we present a re-attention mechanism termed token refinement transformer (TRT) that captures the object-level semantics to guide the localization well. Specifically, TRT introduces a novel module named token priority scoring module (TPSM) to suppress the effects of background noise while focusing on the target object. Then, we incorporate the class activation map as the semantically aware input to restrain the attention map to the target object. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks showcase the superiority of our proposed method against existing methods with image category annotations. Source code is available in urlhttps://github.com/su-hui-zz/ReAttentionTransformer.