# M3Net: Multilevel, Mixed and Multistage Attention Network for Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08365 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08365/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01169/) (2019)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09569/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04849/) (2016)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [Receptive Field Block Net for Accurate and Fast Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07767/) (2017)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08074/) (2020)
- [Reverse Attention for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09940/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Salient Object Detection in Traffic Scene through the TSOD10K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16910/) (2025)
- [External Prompt Features Enhanced Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15008/) (2024)
- [FIPGNet:Pyramid grafting network with feature interaction strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04085/) (2024)
- [GraphBEV++: Multi-Modal Feature Alignment for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16354/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing salient object detection methods mostly use U-Net or feature pyramid structure, which simply aggregates feature maps of different scales, ignoring the uniqueness and interdependence of them and their respective contributions to the final prediction. To overcome these, we propose the M3Net, i.e., the Multilevel, Mixed and Multistage attention network for Salient Object Detection (SOD). Firstly, we propose Multiscale Interaction Block which innovatively introduces the cross-attention approach to achieve the interaction between multilevel features, allowing high-level features to guide low-level feature learning and thus enhancing salient regions. Secondly, considering the fact that previous Transformer based SOD methods locate salient regions only using global self-attention while inevitably overlooking the details of complex objects, we propose the Mixed Attention Block. This block combines global self-attention and window self-attention, aiming at modeling context at both global and local levels to further improve the accuracy of the prediction map. Finally, we proposed a multilevel supervision strategy to optimize the aggregated feature stage-by-stage. Experiments on six challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed M3Net surpasses recent CNN and Transformer-based SOD arts in terms of four metrics. Codes are available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/M3Net.