ViT-CoMer: Vision Transformer with Convolutional Multi-scale Feature Interaction for Dense Predictions

Chunlong Xia, Xinliang Wang, Feng Lv, Xin Hao, Yifeng Shi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 5493-5502

Although Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved significant success in computer vision it does not perform well in dense prediction tasks due to the lack of inner-patch information interaction and the limited diversity of feature scale. Most existing studies are devoted to designing vision-specific transformers to solve the above problems which introduce additional pre-training costs. Therefore we present a plain pre-training-free and feature-enhanced ViT backbone with Convolutional Multi-scale feature interaction named ViT-CoMer which facilitates bidirectional interaction between CNN and transformer. Compared to the state-of-the-art ViT-CoMer has the following advantages: (1) We inject spatial pyramid multi-receptive field convolutional features into the ViT architecture which effectively alleviates the problems of limited local information interaction and single-feature representation in ViT. (2) We propose a simple and efficient CNN-Transformer bidirectional fusion interaction module that performs multi-scale fusion across hierarchical features which is beneficial for handling dense prediction tasks. (3) We evaluate the performance of ViT-CoMer across various dense prediction tasks different frameworks and multiple advanced pre-training. Notably our ViT-CoMer-L achieves 64.3% AP on COCO val2017 without extra training data and 62.1% mIoU on ADE20K val both of which are comparable to state-of-the-art methods. We hope ViT-CoMer can serve as a new backbone for dense prediction tasks to facilitate future research. The code will be released at https://github.com/Traffic-X/ViT-CoMer.