# CLAReSNet: When Convolution Meets Latent Attention for Hyperspectral Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12346 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12346/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Attention Bottlenecks for Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00135/) (2021)
- [SpectralFormer: Rethinking Hyperspectral Image Classification with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02988/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12861/) (2019)
- [HybridSN: Exploring 3D-2D CNN Feature Hierarchy for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06701/) (2019)
- [Three dimensional Deep Learning approach for remote sensing image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05824/) (2018)
- [TransXNet: Learning Both Global and Local Dynamics with a Dual Dynamic Token Mixer for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19380/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification faces critical challenges, including high spectral dimensionality, complex spectral-spatial correlations, and limited training samples with severe class imbalance. While CNNs excel at local feature extraction and transformers capture long-range dependencies, their isolated application yields suboptimal results due to quadratic complexity and insufficient inductive biases. We propose CLAReSNet (Convolutional Latent Attention Residual Spectral Network), a hybrid architecture that integrates multi-scale convolutional extraction with transformer-style attention via an adaptive latent bottleneck. The model employs a multi-scale convolutional stem with deep residual blocks and an enhanced Convolutional Block Attention Module for hierarchical spatial features, followed by spectral encoder layers combining bidirectional RNNs (LSTM/GRU) with Multi-Scale Spectral Latent Attention (MSLA). MSLA reduces complexity from O(T2D) to O(Tlog(T)D) by adaptive latent token allocation (8-64 tokens) that scales logarithmically with the sequence length. Hierarchical cross-attention fusion dynamically aggregates multi-level representations for robust classification. Experiments conducted on the Indian Pines and Salinas datasets show state-of-the-art performance, achieving overall accuracies of 99.71% and 99.96%, significantly surpassing HybridSN, SSRN, and SpectralFormer. The learned embeddings exhibit superior inter-class separability and compact intra-class clustering, validating CLAReSNet's effectiveness under severe class imbalance.
