Affiliations: [a] Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Optoelectronic Measurement Technology and Instrument, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China | [b] Department of Precision Instrument, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China | [c] Science&Technology on Integrated Information System Laboratory, Institute of Software, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China | [d] Beijing Institute of Space Mechanic & Electricity, Beijing Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Remote Sensing, Beijing, China
Correspondence:
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Corresponding authors: Mingxin Yu and Rui You, Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Optoelectronic Measurement Technology and Instrument, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing 100015, China. E-mail: yumingxin@bistu.edu.cn and yourui@bistu.edu.cn.
Abstract: Transformer-based networks have demonstrated their powerful performance in various vision tasks. However, these transformer-based networks are heavyweight and cannot be applied to edge computing (mobile) devices. Despite that the lightweight transformer network has emerged, several problems remain, i.e., weak feature extraction ability, feature redundancy, and lack of convolutional inductive bias. To address these three problems, we propose a lightweight visual transformer (Symmetric Former, SFormer), which contains two novel modules (Symmetric Block and Symmetric FFN). Specifically, we design Symmetric Block to expand feature capacity inside the module and enhance the long-range modeling capability of attention mechanism. To increase the compactness of the model and introduce inductive bias, we introduce convolutional cheap operations to design Symmetric FFN. We compared the SFormer with existing lightweight transformers on several vision tasks. Remarkably, on the image recognition task of ImageNet [13], SFormer gains 1.2% and 1.6% accuracy improvements compared to PVTv2-b0 and Swin Transformer, respectively. On the semantic segmentation task of ADE20K [64], SFormer delivers performance improvements of 0.2% and 0.7% compared to PVTv2-b0 and Swin Transformer, respectively. On the cityscapes dataset [11], SFormer delivers performance improvements of 2.5% and 4.2% compared to PVTv2-b0 and Swin Transformer, respectively. The code is open-source and available at: https://github.com/ISCLab-Bistu/Symmetric_Former.git.
