# Parameter-Free Channel Attention for Image Classification and Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11055 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11055/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Sketch-based Manga Retrieval using Manga109 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04389/) (2015)
- [Fast, Accurate, and Lightweight Super-Resolution with Cascading Residual Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08664/) (2018)
- [BAM: Bottleneck Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06514/) (2018)
- [Efficient Image Super-Resolution Using Pixel Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01073/) (2020)
- [SA-Net: Shuffle Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00240/) (2021)
- [Temporal Modulation Network for Controllable Space-Time Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10642/) (2021)
- [Modulating Image Restoration with Continual Levels via Adaptive Feature Modification Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08118/) (2019)
- [AIM 2020 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06943/) (2020)
- [Parameter-Free Spatial Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12150/) (2018)
- [Sparse, Collaborative, or Nonnegative Representation: Which Helps Pattern Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04329/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Swift Parameter-free Attention Network for Efficient Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12770/) (2023)
- [SwiftChannel: Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Deep Learning-Based 5G Channel Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01931/) (2026)
- [Optimising CSRNet with parameter-free attention mechanisms for crowd counting in public transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18349/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The channel attention mechanism is a useful technique widely employed in deep convolutional neural networks to boost the performance for image processing tasks, eg, image classification and image super-resolution. It is usually designed as a parameterized sub-network and embedded into the convolutional layers of the network to learn more powerful feature representations. However, current channel attention induces more parameters and therefore leads to higher computational costs. To deal with this issue, in this work, we propose a Parameter-Free Channel Attention (PFCA) module to boost the performance of popular image classification and image super-resolution networks, but completely sweep out the parameter growth of channel attention. Experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and DIV2K validate that our PFCA module improves the performance of ResNet on image classification and improves the performance of MSRResNet on image super-resolution tasks, respectively, while bringing little growth of parameters and FLOPs.