Adapting Vision Transformers to Ultra-High Resolution Semantic Segmentation with Relay Tokens
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Current approaches for segmenting ultra high resolution images either slide a window, thereby discarding global context, or downsample and lose fine detail. We propose a simple yet effective method that brings explicit multi scale reasoning to vision transformers, simultaneously preserving local details and global awareness. Concretely, we process each image in parallel at a local scale (high resolution, small crops) and a global scale (low resolution, large crops), and aggregate and propagate features between the two branches with a small set of learnable relay tokens. The design plugs directly into standard transformer backbones (eg ViT and Swin) and adds fewer than 2 % parameters. Extensive experiments on three ultra high resolution segmentation benchmarks, Archaeoscape, URUR, and Gleason, and on the conventional Cityscapes dataset show consistent gains, with up to 15 % relative mIoU improvement. Code and pretrained models are available at https://archaeoscape.ai/work/relay-tokens/ .
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.
Builds on
44 of 54 references.
References · 44
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
- 2021Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windowscited by 12,139
- 2014ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challengecited by 8,498
- 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
- 2014Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentationcited by 4,859
- 2016The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understandingcited by 4,444
- 2016DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFscited by 3,241
- 2018Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentationcited by 3,223
- 2021SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformerscited by 2,940
- 2016Pyramid Scene Parsing Networkcited by 2,479
32 more
- 2017Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentationcited by 2,161
- 2021Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutionscited by 1,962
- 2021Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolutioncited by 1,228
- 2021Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attentioncited by 1,104
- 2024Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Modelcited by 1,056
- 2023Vision Transformers Need Registerscited by 871
- 2021PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformercited by 751
- 2021ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Massescited by 613
- 2022OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentationcited by 328
- 2022Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learningcited by 308
- 2021Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encodingcited by 207
- 2023A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detectioncited by 198
- 2020Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention for Semantic Segmentationcited by 183
- 2023FLatten Transformer: Vision Transformer using Focused Linear Attentioncited by 171
- 2019Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentationcited by 166
- 2020CascadePSP: Toward Class-Agnostic and Very High-Resolution Segmentation via Global and Local Refinementcited by 113
- 2019Boundary-Aware Feature Propagation for Scene Segmentationcited by 107
- 2019Collaborative Global-Local Networks for Memory-Efficient Segmentation of Ultra-High Resolution Imagescited by 51
- 2015Semantic Image Segmentation with Task-Specific Edge Detection Using CNNs and a Discriminatively Trained Domain Transformcited by 46
- 2019Adaptive Weighting Multi-Field-of-View CNN for Semantic Segmentation in Pathologycited by 36
- 2021High Quality Segmentation for Ultra High-resolution Imagescited by 31
- 2024SegMAN: Omni-scale Context Modeling with State Space Models and Local Attention for Semantic Segmentationcited by 31
- 2019Deep Multi-Magnification Networks for Multi-Class Breast Cancer Image Segmentationcited by 22
- 2023Ultra-High Resolution Segmentation with Ultra-Rich Context: A Novel Benchmarkcited by 22
- 2019Multi-scale fully convolutional neural networks for histopathology image segmentation: from nuclear aberrations to the global tissue architecturecited by 20
- 2018Multi-Resolution Networks for Semantic Segmentation in Whole Slide Imagescited by 14
- 2024Ultra-High Resolution Segmentation via Boundary-Enhanced Patch-Merging Transformercited by 10
- 2024xT: Nested Tokenization for Larger Context in Large Imagescited by 8
- 2024Parameter-Inverted Image Pyramid Networkscited by 8
- 2022Full Contextual Attention for Multi-resolution Transformers in Semantic Segmentationcited by 5
- 2022Memory transformers for full context and high-resolution 3D Medical Segmentationcited by 3
- 2024Archaeoscape: Bringing Aerial Laser Scanning Archaeology to the Deep Learning Eracited by 2
Built on by
Not cited yet.