# DnA: Denoising Attention for Visual Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27372 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27372/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The softmax activation in multihead attention (MHA) is the de facto standard for attention-based models in visual perception tasks. However, standard softmax can produce noisy attention patterns that dilute relevant features and degrade its performance. In this paper, we propose Denoising Attention or DnA, in which, first, a positive query identifies which image features belong to the correct class, and a negative query identifies closely associated but irrelevant image features. DnA then projects these interactions into two distinct subspaces with larger principal angles, promoting subspace separation and improved discriminability. Using a ViT-B backbone, our proposed DnA achieves an absolute gain of 0.8% on ImageNet-1K compared to the baseline. We further show improvements across multiple visual understanding tasks, including video understanding with video transformers (1.8%) and video LLMs (0.5%). Our extensive empirical analyses justify the design choices involving two interacting subspaces and the denoising effect of DnA.