# Inter2Former: Dynamic Hybrid Attention for Efficient High-Precision Interactive

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09612 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09612/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Analysis: an Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10517/) (2023)
- [EfficientSAM: Leveraged Masked Image Pretraining for Efficient Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00863/) (2023)
- [FLatten Transformer: Vision Transformer using Focused Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00442/) (2023)
- [Reviving Iterative Training with Mask Guidance for Interactive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06583/) (2021)
- [Deep Interactive Object Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04042/) (2016)
- [Self-attention Does Not Need O(n2) Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05682/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interactive segmentation (IS) improves annotation efficiency by segmenting target regions from user prompts, with widespread applications in real-world scenarios. Current approaches face a critical trade-off: dense-token methods achieve superior accuracy and detail preservation but suffer from prohibitively slow processing on CPU devices, while the Segment Anything Model (SAM) advances the field with sparse prompt tokens for fast inference but compromises segmentation quality. In this paper, we propose Inter2Former to address this challenge by optimizing computation allocation in dense-token processing, which introduces four key enhancements. First, we propose Dynamic Prompt Embedding (DPE) that adaptively processes only regions of interest while avoiding additional overhead from background tokens. Second, we introduce Dynamic Hybrid Attention (DHA), which leverages previous segmentation masks to route tokens through either full attention (O(N2)) for boundary regions or our proposed efficient BSQ attention (O(N)) for non-boundary regions. Third, we develop Hybrid Mixture of Experts (HMoE), which applies similar adaptive computation strategies in FFN modules with CPU-optimized parallel processing. Finally, we present Dynamic Local Upsampling (DLU), a reverse operation of DPE, which localizes objects with a lightweight MLP and performs fine-grained upsampling only in detected regions. Experimental results on high-precision IS benchmarks demonstrate that Inter2Former achieves SOTA performance with high efficiency on CPU devices.