# Scattering Vision Transformer: Spectral Mixing Matters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01310 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01310/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (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)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01526/) (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)
- [ResNeSt: Split-Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08955/) (2020)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [SiMBA: Simplified Mamba-Based Architecture for Vision and Multivariate Time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15360/) (2024)
- [Mamba-360: Survey of State Space Models as Transformer Alternative for Long Sequence Modelling: Methods, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16112/) (2024)
- [CAS-ViT: Convolutional Additive Self-attention Vision Transformers for Efficient Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03703/) (2024)
- [Graph Convolutions Enrich the Self-Attention in Transformers!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04234/) (2023)
- [Frequency-Dynamic Attention Modulation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12006/) (2025)
- [Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22249/) (2025)
- [Heracles: A Hybrid SSM-Transformer Model for High-Resolution Image and Time-Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18063/) (2024)
- [HAMSA: Scanning-Free Vision State Space Models via SpectralPulseNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14724/) (2026)
- [Image Recognition with Online Lightweight Vision Transformer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03113/) (2025)
- [Frequency-Aware Token Reduction for Efficient Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21477/) (2025)
- [MxT: Mamba x Transformer for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16126/) (2024)
- [NAKUL-Med: Spectral-Graph State Space Models with Dynamics Kernels for Medical Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00871/) (2026)
- [Beyond Frequency: Seeing Subtle Cues Through the Lens of Spatial Decomposition for Fine-Grained Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06959/) (2025)
- [Continual Field-Adaptive Models (CFAMs) for Post-Deployment Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04552/) (2026)
- [QiT: Quantum-Inspired Transformer for Visual Recognition Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17789/) (2026)
- [Riemannian--Lorentz Fusion of Vision Transformers and State-Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19384/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision transformers have gained significant attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, instance segmentation, and object detection. However, challenges remain in addressing attention complexity and effectively capturing fine-grained information within images. Existing solutions often resort to down-sampling operations, such as pooling, to reduce computational cost. Unfortunately, such operations are non-invertible and can result in information loss. In this paper, we present a novel approach called Scattering Vision Transformer (SVT) to tackle these challenges. SVT incorporates a spectrally scattering network that enables the capture of intricate image details. SVT overcomes the invertibility issue associated with down-sampling operations by separating low-frequency and high-frequency components. Furthermore, SVT introduces a unique spectral gating network utilizing Einstein multiplication for token and channel mixing, effectively reducing complexity. We show that SVT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet dataset with a significant reduction in a number of parameters and FLOPS. SVT shows 2% improvement over LiTv2 and iFormer. SVT-H-S reaches 84.2% top-1 accuracy, while SVT-H-B reaches 85.2% (state-of-art for base versions) and SVT-H-L reaches 85.7% (again state-of-art for large versions). SVT also shows comparable results in other vision tasks such as instance segmentation. SVT also outperforms other transformers in transfer learning on standard datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Oxford Flower, and Stanford Car datasets. The project page is available on this webpage.urlhttps://badripatro.github.io/svt/.