# FViT: A Focal Vision Transformer with Gabor Filter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11303 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11303/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 132 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [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)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [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)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)

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

- [LookHere: Vision Transformers with Directed Attention Generalize and Extrapolate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13985/) (2024)
- [Long-Term Prediction Accuracy Improvement of Data-Driven Medium-Range Global Weather Forecast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01598/) (2024)
- [When does fusing hand-crafted knowledge with learned representations pay? A cost-normalized benchmark of stacking, substitution, and interference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21098/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision transformers have achieved encouraging progress in various computer vision tasks. A common belief is that this is attributed to the capability of self-attention in modeling the global dependencies among feature tokens. However, self-attention still faces several challenges in dense prediction tasks, including high computational complexity and absence of desirable inductive bias. To alleviate these issues, the potential advantages of combining vision transformers with Gabor filters are revisited, and a learnable Gabor filter (LGF) using convolution is proposed. The LGF does not rely on self-attention, and it is used to simulate the response of fundamental cells in the biological visual system to the input images. This encourages vision transformers to focus on discriminative feature representations of targets across different scales and orientations. In addition, a Bionic Focal Vision (BFV) block is designed based on the LGF. This block draws inspiration from neuroscience and introduces a Dual-Path Feed Forward Network (DPFFN) to emulate the parallel and cascaded information processing scheme of the biological visual cortex. Furthermore, a unified and efficient family of pyramid backbone networks called Focal Vision Transformers (FViTs) is developed by stacking BFV blocks. Experimental results indicate that FViTs demonstrate superior performance in various vision tasks. In terms of computational efficiency and scalability, FViTs show significant advantages compared with other counterparts.