# MSVIT: Improving Spiking Vision Transformer Using Multi-scale Attention Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14719 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14719/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Spikformer: When Spiking Neural Network Meets Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15425/) (2022)
- [X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14080/) (2020)
- [Spike-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01694/) (2023)
- [FacT: Factor-Tuning for Lightweight Adaptation on Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03145/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Vision Transformers for MobileNet Size and Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08059/) (2022)
- [Attention Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13929/) (2022)
- [Spike-driven Transformer V2: Meta Spiking Neural Network Architecture Inspiring the Design of Next-generation Neuromorphic Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03663/) (2024)
- [SpikingResformer: Bridging ResNet and Vision Transformer in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14302/) (2024)
- [Masked Spiking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01208/) (2022)
- [Spikformer V2: Join the High Accuracy Club on ImageNet with an SNN Ticket](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02020/) (2024)
- [EcoFormer: Energy-Saving Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09004/) (2022)

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

- [SpikCommander: A High-performance Spiking Transformer with Multi-view Learning for Efficient Speech Command Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07883/) (2025)
- [SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08270/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Vision Transformer architectures has garnered significant attention due to their potential for energy-efficient and high-performance computing paradigms. However, a substantial performance gap still exists between SNN-based and ANN-based transformer architectures. While existing methods propose spiking self-attention mechanisms that are successfully combined with SNNs, the overall architectures proposed by these methods suffer from a bottleneck in effectively extracting features from different image scales. In this paper, we address this issue and propose MSVIT. This novel spike-driven Transformer architecture firstly uses multi-scale spiking attention (MSSA) to enhance the capabilities of spiking attention blocks. We validate our approach across various main datasets. The experimental results show that MSVIT outperforms existing SNN-based models, positioning itself as a state-of-the-art solution among SNN-transformer architectures. The codes are available at https://github.com/Nanhu-AI-Lab/MSViT.