# Token Transformer: Can class token help window-based transformer build better long-range interactions?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06083/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Tokens for Efficient Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07658/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Spatial Dimensions of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16302/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [Dilated Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09914/) (2017)
- [DeepViT: Towards Deeper Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11886/) (2021)
- [Focal Self-attention for Local-Global Interactions in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00641/) (2021)
- [Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05704/) (2021)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [DaViT: Dual Attention Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03645/) (2022)
- [CrossFormer: A Versatile Vision Transformer Hinging on Cross-scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00154/) (2021)
- [QuadTree Attention for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02767/) (2022)
- [RegionViT: Regional-to-Local Attention for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02689/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compared with the vanilla transformer, the window-based transformer offers a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Although the window-based transformer has made great progress, its long-range modeling capabilities are limited due to the size of the local window and the window connection scheme. To address this problem, we propose a novel Token Transformer (TT). The core mechanism of TT is the addition of a Class (CLS) token for summarizing window information in each local window. We refer to this type of token interaction as CLS Attention. These CLS tokens will interact spatially with the tokens in each window to enable long-range modeling. In order to preserve the hierarchical design of the window-based transformer, we designed Feature Inheritance Module (FIM) in each phase of TT to deliver the local window information from the previous phase to the CLS token in the next phase. In addition, we have designed a Spatial-Channel Feedforward Network (SCFFN) in TT, which can mix CLS tokens and embedded tokens on the spatial domain and channel domain without additional parameters. Extensive experiments have shown that our TT achieves competitive results with low parameters in image classification and downstream tasks.