Scale-Aware Modulation Meet Transformer

Weifeng Lin, Ziheng Wu, Jiayu Chen, Jun Huang, Lianwen Jin; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 6015-6026

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, ScaleAware Modulation Transformer (SMT), that can handle various downstream tasks efficiently by combining the convolutional network and vision Transformer. The proposed ScaleAware Modulation (SAM) in the SMT includes two primary novel designs. Firstly, we introduce the Multi-Head Mixed Convolution (MHMC) module, which can capture multiscale features and expand the receptive field. Secondly, we propose the Scale-Aware Aggregation (SAA) module, which is lightweight but effective, enabling information fusion across different heads. By leveraging these two modules, convolutional modulation is further enhanced. Furthermore, in contrast to prior works that utilized modulations throughout all stages to build an attention-free network, we propose an Evolutionary Hybrid Network (EHN), which can effectively simulate the shift from capturing local to global dependencies as the network becomes deeper, resulting in superior performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a wide range of visual tasks. Specifically, SMT with 11.5M / 2.4GFLOPs and 32M / 7.7GFLOPs can achieve 82.2% and 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, respectively. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224x224 resolution, it attains 87.1% and 88.1% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224x224 and 384x384 , respectively. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, the SMT base trained with 1x and 3x schedule outperforms the Swin Transformer counterpart by 4.2 and 1.3 mAP on COCO, respectively. For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, the SMT base test at single- and multi-scale surpasses Swin by 2.0 and 1.1 mIoU respectively on the ADE20K. Our code is available at https://github.com/AFeng-x/SMT.