Vision-RWKV: Efficient and Scalable Visual Perception with RWKV-Like Architectures
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Transformers have revolutionized computer vision and natural language processing, but their high computational complexity limits their application in high-resolution image processing and long-context analysis. This paper introduces Vision-RWKV (VRWKV), a model adapted from the RWKV model used in the NLP field with necessary modifications for vision tasks. Similar to the Vision Transformer (ViT), our model is designed to efficiently handle sparse inputs and demonstrate robust global processing capabilities, while also scaling up effectively, accommodating both large-scale parameters and extensive datasets. Its distinctive advantage lies in its reduced spatial aggregation complexity, which renders it exceptionally adept at processing high-resolution images seamlessly, eliminating the necessity for windowing operations. Our evaluations demonstrate that VRWKV surpasses ViT's performance in image classification and has significantly faster speeds and lower memory usage processing high-resolution inputs. In dense prediction tasks, it outperforms window-based models, maintaining comparable speeds. These results highlight VRWKV's potential as a more efficient alternative for visual perception tasks. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Vision-RWKV.
Key facts. Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 54 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2024.
Builds on
54 of 68 references.
References · 54
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
- 2014Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognitioncited by 15,267
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
- 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
- 2021Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windowscited by 12,082
- 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,339
- 2017Mask R-CNNcited by 7,259
38 more
- 2016Densely Connected Convolutional Networkscited by 6,691
- 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
- 2016Layer Normalizationcited by 5,579
- 2016SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restartscited by 4,993
- 2017Squeeze-and-Excitation Networkscited by 4,763
- 2023Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spacescited by 4,616
- 2020Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attentioncited by 4,560
- 2014Going Deeper with Convolutionscited by 4,231
- 2022FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awarenesscited by 3,611
- 2022A ConvNet for the 2020scited by 3,545
- 2021Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spacescited by 2,424
- 2021Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutionscited by 1,960
- 2017Deformable Convolutional Networkscited by 1,481
- 2020Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexitycited by 1,462
- 2018Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understandingcited by 1,265
- 2024Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Modelcited by 1,051
- 2024VMamba: Visual State Space Modelcited by 955
- 2023RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Eracited by 814
- 2022Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modelingcited by 776
- 2021Going deeper with Image Transformerscited by 759
- 2021PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformercited by 749
- 2018Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Resultscited by 666
- 2021Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layerscited by 607
- 2023Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Modelscited by 594
- 2022Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictionscited by 564
- 2021How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformerscited by 562
- 2022Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, A Large-Scale Generative Language Modelcited by 557
- 2022InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutionscited by 479
- 2019Selective Kernel Networkscited by 401
- 2021XCiT: Cross-Covariance Image Transformerscited by 335
- 2021Scaling Local Self-Attention for Parameter Efficient Visual Backbonescited by 220
- 2023LongNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000,000,000 Tokenscited by 201
- 2018Online normalizer calculation for softmaxcited by 154
- 2023Selective Structured State-Spaces for Long-Form Video Understandingcited by 105
- 2023Hierarchically Gated Recurrent Neural Network for Sequence Modelingcited by 100
- 2023RMT: Retentive Networks Meet Vision Transformerscited by 68
- 2024Efficient Deformable ConvNets: Rethinking Dynamic and Sparse Operator for Vision Applicationscited by 49
- 2023Toeplitz Neural Network for Sequence Modelingcited by 43
50 most cited of 54 All 54 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 30; 2025: 42; 2026: 25.
97 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2024Video Mamba Suite: State Space Model as a Versatile Alternative for Video Understandingcited by 106
- 2024State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Surveycited by 59
- 2024Vision-LSTM: xLSTM as Generic Vision Backbonecited by 51
- 2024Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Modelscited by 41
- 2024LION: Linear Group RNN for 3D Object Detection in Point Cloudscited by 38
- 2024Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKVcited by 36
- 2025Shifting AI Efficiency From Model-Centric to Data-Centric Compressioncited by 29
- 2024RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learnercited by 23
- 2025Linear Attention Modeling for Learned Image Compressioncited by 22
- 2024PointRWKV: Efficient RWKV-Like Model for Hierarchical Point Cloud Learningcited by 21
- 2024Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Modelcited by 18
- 2024On Efficient Variants of Segment Anything Model: A Surveycited by 16
38 more
- 2024MobileMamba: Lightweight Multi-Receptive Visual Mamba Networkcited by 16
- 2024ViG: Linear-complexity Visual Sequence Learning with Gated Linear Attentioncited by 13
- 2024Explaining Modern Gated-Linear RNNs via a Unified Implicit Attention Formulationcited by 11
- 2024Event Stream based Human Action Recognition: A High-Definition Benchmark Dataset and Algorithmscited by 11
- 2024A Survey on Multimodal Wearable Sensor-based Human Action Recognitioncited by 10
- 2024Audio Mamba: Pretrained Audio State Space Model For Audio Taggingcited by 9
- 2024You Only Scan Once: Efficient Multi-dimension Sequential Modeling with LightNetcited by 9
- 2024OccRWKV: Rethinking Efficient 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Linear Complexitycited by 9
- 2025Hadamard product in deep learning: Introduction, Advances and Challengescited by 9
- 2025AuroraLong: Bringing RNNs Back to Efficient Open-Ended Video Understandingcited by 9
- 2025RWKV-UNet: Improving UNet with Long-Range Cooperation for Effective Medical Image Segmentationcited by 7
- 2025RGB-Event based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Benchmark Dataset and An Asymmetric RWKV Fusion Frameworkcited by 7
- 2025TransMamba: Fast Universal Architecture Adaption from Transformers to Mambacited by 6
- 2024EMOv2: Pushing 5M Vision Model Frontiercited by 5
- 2024A Survey of RWKVcited by 5
- 2025LOCORE: Image Re-ranking with Long-Context Sequence Modelingcited by 5
- 2025ViT-Linearizer: Distilling Quadratic Knowledge into Linear-Time Vision Modelscited by 5
- 2025Overflow Prevention Enhances Long-Context Recurrent LLMscited by 5
- 2025C3-OWD: A Curriculum Cross-modal Contrastive Learning Framework for Open-World Detectioncited by 5
- 2024Video RWKV:Video Action Recognition Based RWKVcited by 4
- 2025Parallel Sequence Modeling via Generalized Spatial Propagation Networkcited by 4
- 2025Thicker and Quicker: A Jumbo Token for Fast Plain Vision Transformerscited by 4
- 2025RWKVQuant: Quantizing the RWKV Family with Proxy Guided Hybrid of Scalar and Vector Quantizationcited by 4
- 2024Learning 1D Causal Visual Representation with De-focus Attention Networkscited by 3
- 2024Enhancing Environmental Monitoring through Multispectral Imaging: The WasteMS Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Lakeside Wastecited by 3
- 2024Exploring Real&Synthetic Dataset and Linear Attention in Image Restorationcited by 3
- 2025S2AFormer: Strip Self-Attention for Efficient Vision Transformercited by 3
- 2025FEAT: Full-Dimensional Efficient Attention Transformer for Medical Video Generationcited by 3
- 2025SAGA: Selective Adaptive Gating for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attentioncited by 3
- 2025UniLION: Towards Unified Autonomous Driving Model with Linear Group RNNscited by 3
- 2026EMFormer: Efficient Multi-Scale Transformer for Accumulative Context Weather Forecastingcited by 3
- 2026Innovative Tooth Segmentation Using Hierarchical Features and Bidirectional Sequence Modelingcited by 3
- 2026HAMSA: Scanning-Free Vision State Space Models via SpectralPulseNetcited by 3
- 2026LaplacianFormer:Rethinking Linear Attention with Laplacian Kernelcited by 3
- 2024Experimentation in Content Moderation using RWKVcited by 2
- 2024SCASeg: Strip Cross-Attention for Efficient Semantic Segmentationcited by 2
- 2024StyleRWKV: High-Quality and High-Efficiency Style Transfer with RWKV-like Architecturecited by 2
- 2025Multi-View Learning with Context-Guided Receptance for Image Denoisingcited by 2
50 most cited of 97 All 97 (JSON)
- 2026Beyond the Foreground: FOV-Aware Polyp Image Synthesis via Lesion-Guided Adaptive Mucosal Context Propagation17 Sep 2026
- 2026FU-Mamba: A Frequency-Enhanced Dynamic Scanning Framework for Oralscan Image Segmentation27 Aug 2026
- 2026CLUIE: Clustering-Aware Recurrent Propagation with Local Structural Compensation for Underwater Image Enhancement23 Jul 2026
- 2026Vision Non-Causal Trapezoidal Mamba: Eliminating Directional Scanning in Vision SSMs with Second-Order Dynamics3 Jul 2026
- 2026Cross-Modal Iteration Distillation for Robust IHD Screening: The IDNet Framework and A New Benchmark29 Jun 2026
- 2026Scaling Parallel Sequence Models to Foundation-Scale Vision Encoders30 May 2026
- 2026SCRWKV: Ultra-Compact Structure-Calibrated Vision-RWKV for Topological Crack Segmentation14 May 2026
- 2026PaperFit: Vision-in-the-Loop Typesetting Optimization for Scientific Documents11 May 2026
- 2026LaplacianFormer:Rethinking Linear Attention with Laplacian Kernel22 Apr 2026
- 2026PestVL-Net: Enabling Multimodal Pest Learning via Fine-grained Vision-Language Interaction19 Apr 2026
- 2026HAMSA: Scanning-Free Vision State Space Models via SpectralPulseNet16 Apr 2026
- 2026Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning and Tri-Token Prompt Learning Embraced High-Order RWKV for Pan-Sharpening16 Apr 2026
38 more
- 2026EventFace: Event-Based Face Recognition via Structure-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling8 Apr 2026
- 2026Towards Controllable Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Continuous Multi-illumination Dataset and Efficient State Space Framework26 Mar 2026
- 2026MFil-Mamba: Multi-Filter Scanning for Spatial Redundancy-Aware Visual State Space Models20 Mar 2026
- 2026Efficiency Follows Global-Local Decoupling20 Mar 2026
- 2026LoCAtion: Long-time Collaborative Attention Framework for High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction15 Mar 2026
- 2026Innovative Tooth Segmentation Using Hierarchical Features and Bidirectional Sequence Modeling25 Feb 2026
- 2026Towards Remote Sensing Change Detection with Neural Memory11 Feb 2026
- 2026MirrorLA: Reflecting Feature Map for Vision Linear Attention4 Feb 2026
- 2026EMFormer: Efficient Multi-Scale Transformer for Accumulative Context Weather Forecasting1 Feb 2026
- 2026KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV1 Feb 2026
- 2026ASBA: A-line State Space Model and B-line Attention for Sparse Optical Doppler Tomography Reconstruction20 Jan 2026
- 2026SoLA-Vision: Fine-grained Layer-wise Linear Softmax Hybrid Attention16 Jan 2026
- 2026MFC-RFNet: A Multi-scale Guided Rectified Flow Network for Radar Sequence Prediction7 Jan 2026
- 2025Fourier-RWKV: A Multi-State Perception Network for Efficient Image Dehazing9 Dec 2025
- 2025GSPN-2: Efficient Parallel Sequence Modeling28 Nov 2025
- 2025TM-UNet: Token-Memory Enhanced Sequential Modeling for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation15 Nov 2025
- 2025RWKV-PCSSC: Exploring RWKV Model for Point Cloud Semantic Scene Completion13 Nov 2025
- 2025Otter: Mitigating Background Distractions of Wide-Angle Few-Shot Action Recognition with Enhanced RWKV10 Nov 2025
- 2025MRT: Learning Compact Representations with Mixed RWKV-Transformer for Extreme Image Compression10 Nov 2025
- 2025MACMD: Multi-dilated Contextual Attention and Channel Mixer Decoding for Medical Image Segmentation8 Nov 2025
- 2025UniLION: Towards Unified Autonomous Driving Model with Linear Group RNNs3 Nov 2025
- 2025ITC-RWKV: Interactive Tissue-Cell Modeling with Recurrent Key-Value Aggregation for Histopathological Subtyping24 Oct 2025
- 2025Synergistic Modality-and-Slice Memory Framework for Cross-Modal 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation12 Oct 2025
- 2025FS-RWKV: Leveraging Frequency Spatial-Aware RWKV for 3T-to-7T MRI Translation10 Oct 2025
- 2025VRWKV-Editor: Reducing quadratic complexity in transformer-based video editing30 Sep 2025
- 2025C3-OWD: A Curriculum Cross-modal Contrastive Learning Framework for Open-World Detection27 Sep 2025
- 2025SAGA: Selective Adaptive Gating for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention16 Sep 2025
- 2025EfficientIML: Efficient High-Resolution Image Manipulation Localization10 Sep 2025
- 2025DRWKV: Focusing on Object Edges for Low-Light Image Enhancement24 Jul 2025
- 2025U-RWKV: Lightweight medical image segmentation with direction-adaptive RWKV15 Jul 2025
- 2025AuroraLong: Bringing RNNs Back to Efficient Open-Ended Video Understanding3 Jul 2025
- 2025EvRWKV: A Continuous Interactive RWKV Framework for Effective Event-Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement1 Jul 2025
- 2025Out-of-Distribution Semantic Occupancy Prediction26 Jun 2025
- 2025Norm×Direction: Restoring the Missing Query Norm in Vision Linear Attention26 Jun 2025
- 2025pLSTM: parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networks13 Jun 2025
- 2025InceptionMamba: An Efficient Hybrid Network with Large Band Convolution and Bottleneck Mamba10 Jun 2025
- 2025FEAT: Full-Dimensional Efficient Attention Transformer for Medical Video Generation5 Jun 2025
- 2025S2AFormer: Strip Self-Attention for Efficient Vision Transformer28 May 2025
50 newest of 97 All 97 (JSON)
- 2024Video Mamba Suite: State Space Model as a Versatile Alternative for Video Understandingcited by 106
- 2024LION: Linear Group RNN for 3D Object Detection in Point Cloudscited by 38
- 2024Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Modelcited by 18
- 2024MobileMamba: Lightweight Multi-Receptive Visual Mamba Networkcited by 16
- 2024Explaining Modern Gated-Linear RNNs via a Unified Implicit Attention Formulationcited by 11
- 2024Audio Mamba: Pretrained Audio State Space Model For Audio Taggingcited by 9
- 2025TransMamba: Fast Universal Architecture Adaption from Transformers to Mambacited by 6
- 2025Overflow Prevention Enhances Long-Context Recurrent LLMscited by 5
- 2025pLSTM: parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networkscited by 2
- 2026Vision Non-Causal Trapezoidal Mamba: Eliminating Directional Scanning in Vision SSMs with Second-Order Dynamicscited by 1
- 2025InceptionMamba: An Efficient Hybrid Network with Large Band Convolution and Bottleneck Mambacited by 0
- 2026MFil-Mamba: Multi-Filter Scanning for Spatial Redundancy-Aware Visual State Space Modelscited by 0
12 most cited of 13 All 13 (JSON)
- 2026FU-Mamba: A Frequency-Enhanced Dynamic Scanning Framework for Oralscan Image Segmentation27 Aug 2026
- 2026Vision Non-Causal Trapezoidal Mamba: Eliminating Directional Scanning in Vision SSMs with Second-Order Dynamics3 Jul 2026
- 2026MFil-Mamba: Multi-Filter Scanning for Spatial Redundancy-Aware Visual State Space Models20 Mar 2026
- 2025pLSTM: parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networks13 Jun 2025
- 2025InceptionMamba: An Efficient Hybrid Network with Large Band Convolution and Bottleneck Mamba10 Jun 2025
- 2025Overflow Prevention Enhances Long-Context Recurrent LLMs12 May 2025
- 2025TransMamba: Fast Universal Architecture Adaption from Transformers to Mamba21 Feb 2025
- 2024MobileMamba: Lightweight Multi-Receptive Visual Mamba Network24 Nov 2024
- 2024LION: Linear Group RNN for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds25 Jul 2024
- 2024Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Model27 Jun 2024
- 2024Explaining Modern Gated-Linear RNNs via a Unified Implicit Attention Formulation26 May 2024
- 2024Audio Mamba: Pretrained Audio State Space Model For Audio Tagging22 May 2024
12 newest of 13 All 13 (JSON)
- 2024Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Modelscited by 41
- 2025VRWKV-Editor: Reducing quadratic complexity in transformer-based video editingcited by 0
- 2026MFC-RFNet: A Multi-scale Guided Rectified Flow Network for Radar Sequence Predictioncited by 0
- 2026KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKVcited by 0
- 2026KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV1 Feb 2026
- 2026MFC-RFNet: A Multi-scale Guided Rectified Flow Network for Radar Sequence Prediction7 Jan 2026
- 2025VRWKV-Editor: Reducing quadratic complexity in transformer-based video editing30 Sep 2025
- 2024Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Models6 Apr 2024
- 2024State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Surveycited by 59
- 2024Vision-LSTM: xLSTM as Generic Vision Backbonecited by 51
- 2024Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKVcited by 36
- 2024RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learnercited by 23
- 2025Linear Attention Modeling for Learned Image Compressioncited by 22
- 2024PointRWKV: Efficient RWKV-Like Model for Hierarchical Point Cloud Learningcited by 21
- 2024On Efficient Variants of Segment Anything Model: A Surveycited by 16
- 2024ViG: Linear-complexity Visual Sequence Learning with Gated Linear Attentioncited by 13
- 2024Event Stream based Human Action Recognition: A High-Definition Benchmark Dataset and Algorithmscited by 11
- 2024A Survey on Multimodal Wearable Sensor-based Human Action Recognitioncited by 10
- 2024You Only Scan Once: Efficient Multi-dimension Sequential Modeling with LightNetcited by 9
- 2024OccRWKV: Rethinking Efficient 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Linear Complexitycited by 9
12 most cited of 78 All 78 (JSON)
- 2026Beyond the Foreground: FOV-Aware Polyp Image Synthesis via Lesion-Guided Adaptive Mucosal Context Propagation17 Sep 2026
- 2026CLUIE: Clustering-Aware Recurrent Propagation with Local Structural Compensation for Underwater Image Enhancement23 Jul 2026
- 2026Cross-Modal Iteration Distillation for Robust IHD Screening: The IDNet Framework and A New Benchmark29 Jun 2026
- 2026Scaling Parallel Sequence Models to Foundation-Scale Vision Encoders30 May 2026
- 2026SCRWKV: Ultra-Compact Structure-Calibrated Vision-RWKV for Topological Crack Segmentation14 May 2026
- 2026PaperFit: Vision-in-the-Loop Typesetting Optimization for Scientific Documents11 May 2026
- 2026LaplacianFormer:Rethinking Linear Attention with Laplacian Kernel22 Apr 2026
- 2026PestVL-Net: Enabling Multimodal Pest Learning via Fine-grained Vision-Language Interaction19 Apr 2026
- 2026HAMSA: Scanning-Free Vision State Space Models via SpectralPulseNet16 Apr 2026
- 2026Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning and Tri-Token Prompt Learning Embraced High-Order RWKV for Pan-Sharpening16 Apr 2026
- 2026EventFace: Event-Based Face Recognition via Structure-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling8 Apr 2026
- 2026Towards Controllable Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Continuous Multi-illumination Dataset and Efficient State Space Framework26 Mar 2026
12 newest of 78 All 78 (JSON)