Low-Resolution Self-Attention for Semantic Segmentation.

Wu, Yu-Huan; Zhang, Shi-Chen; Liu, Yun; Zhang, Le; Zhan, Xin; Zhou, Daquan; Feng, Jiashi; Cheng, Ming-Ming et al. · IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell · 2025

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Semantic segmentation tasks naturally require high-resolution information for pixel-wise segmentation and global context information for class prediction. While existing vision transformers demonstrate promising performance, they often utilize high-resolution context modeling, resulting in a computational bottleneck. In this work, we challenge conventional wisdom and introduce the Low-Resolution Self-Attention (LRSA) mechanism to capture global context at a significantly reduced computational cost, i.e., FLOPs. Our approach involves computing self-attention in a fixed low-resolution space, regardless of the input image's resolution, with additional $\text{3}\times \text{3}$3×3 depth-wise convolutions to capture fine details in the high-resolution space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our LRSA approach by building the LRFormer, a vision transformer with an encoder-decoder structure. Extensive experiments on the ADE20 K, COCO-Stuff, and CityScapes datasets demonstrate that LRFormer outperforms state-of-the-art models.