# SAG-ViT: A Scale-Aware, High-Fidelity Patching Approach with Graph Attention for Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11605/) (2021)
- [CMT: Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06263/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DGSAN: Dual-Graph Spatiotemporal Attention Network for Pulmonary Nodule Malignancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20898/) (2025)
- [Fragment-Aware Vision Transformers for Fresco-Fragment Style Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21012/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have redefined image classification by leveraging self-attention to capture complex patterns and long-range dependencies between image patches. However, a key challenge for ViTs is efficiently incorporating multi-scale feature representations, which is inherent in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) through their hierarchical structure. Graph transformers have made strides in addressing this by leveraging graph-based modeling, but they often lose or insufficiently represent spatial hierarchies, especially since redundant or less relevant areas dilute the image's contextual representation. To bridge this gap, we propose SAG-ViT, a Scale-Aware Graph Attention ViT that integrates multi-scale feature capabilities of CNNs, representational power of ViTs, graph-attended patching to enable richer contextual representation. Using EfficientNetV2 as a backbone, the model extracts multi-scale feature maps, dividing them into patches to preserve richer semantic information compared to directly patching the input images. The patches are structured into a graph using spatial and feature similarities, where a Graph Attention Network (GAT) refines the node embeddings. This refined graph representation is then processed by a Transformer encoder, capturing long-range dependencies and complex interactions. We evaluate SAG-ViT on benchmark datasets across various domains, validating its effectiveness in advancing image classification tasks. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/shravan-18/SAG-ViT.