# SCSA: Exploring the Synergistic Effects Between Spatial and Channel Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05128 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05128/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [WiFi-based Cross-Domain Gesture Recognition Using Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04521/) (2025)
- [LGMSNet: Thinning a medical image segmentation model via dual-level multiscale fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15476/) (2025)
- [DMAGaze: Gaze Estimation Based on Feature Disentanglement and Multi-Scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11160/) (2025)
- [SAAT: Synergistic Alternating Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03740/) (2025)
- [FAD-Net: Frequency-Domain Attention-Guided Diffusion Network for Coronary Artery Segmentation using Invasive Coronary Angiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11454/) (2025)
- [A Spatial Semantics and Continuity Perception Attention for Remote Sensing Water Body Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16143/) (2025)
- [Revisiting the Ordering of Channel and Spatial Attention: A Comprehensive Study on Sequential and Parallel Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07310/) (2026)
- [Low-light Image Enhancement via Multi-scale Attention combined with Fourier Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24002/) (2026)
- [ExpertoRhythm: Morphology-Aware Learning for Waveform Reconstruction and Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation from Single-Channel PPG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34146/) (2026)
- [Region Aware Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15079/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Channel and spatial attentions have respectively brought significant improvements in extracting feature dependencies and spatial structure relations for various downstream vision tasks. While their combination is more beneficial for leveraging their individual strengths, the synergy between channel and spatial attentions has not been fully explored, lacking in fully harness the synergistic potential of multi-semantic information for feature guidance and mitigation of semantic disparities. Our study attempts to reveal the synergistic relationship between spatial and channel attention at multiple semantic levels, proposing a novel Spatial and Channel Synergistic Attention module (SCSA). Our SCSA consists of two parts: the Shareable Multi-Semantic Spatial Attention (SMSA) and the Progressive Channel-wise Self-Attention (PCSA). SMSA integrates multi-semantic information and utilizes a progressive compression strategy to inject discriminative spatial priors into PCSA's channel self-attention, effectively guiding channel recalibration. Additionally, the robust feature interactions based on the self-attention mechanism in PCSA further mitigate the disparities in multi-semantic information among different sub-features within SMSA. We conduct extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets, including classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection on MSCOCO 2017, segmentation on ADE20K, and four other complex scene detection datasets. Our results demonstrate that our proposed SCSA not only surpasses the current state-of-the-art attention but also exhibits enhanced generalization capabilities across various task scenarios. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/HZAI-ZJNU/SCSA.