# UniConvNet: Expanding Effective Receptive Field while Maintaining Asymptotically Gaussian Distribution for ConvNets of Any Scale

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09000/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [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)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [UniBlendNet: Unified Global, Multi-Scale, and Region-Adaptive Modeling for Ambient Lighting Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13383/) (2026)
- [Activation-Free Backbones for Image Recognition: Polynomial Alternatives within MetaFormer-Style Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20839/) (2026)
- [Do Newer Lightweight CNNs Perform Better Under Resource Constraints? A Controlled Multigenerational Study of Architecture, Initialization, Training Budget, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) with large effective receptive field (ERF), still in their early stages, have demonstrated promising effectiveness while constrained by high parameters and FLOPs costs and disrupted asymptotically Gaussian distribution (AGD) of ERF. This paper proposes an alternative paradigm: rather than merely employing extremely large ERF, it is more effective and efficient to expand the ERF while maintaining AGD of ERF by proper combination of smaller kernels, such as 7×7, 9×9, 11×11. This paper introduces a Three-layer Receptive Field Aggregator and designs a Layer Operator as the fundamental operator from the perspective of receptive field. The ERF can be expanded to the level of existing large-kernel ConvNets through the stack of proposed modules while maintaining AGD of ERF. Using these designs, we propose a universal model for ConvNet of any scale, termed UniConvNet. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K demonstrate that UniConvNet outperforms state-of-the-art CNNs and ViTs across various vision recognition tasks for both lightweight and large-scale models with comparable throughput. Surprisingly, UniConvNet-T achieves 84.2% ImageNet top-1 accuracy with 30M parameters and 5.1G FLOPs. UniConvNet-XL also shows competitive scalability to big data and large models, acquiring 88.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/ai-paperwithcode/UniConvNet.