While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three challenges for applying self-attention in computer vision: (1) treating images as 1D sequences neglects their 2D structures; (2) the quadratic complexity is too expensive for high-resolution images; (3) it only captures spatial adaptability but ignores channel adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel linear attention named large kernel attention (LKA) to enable self-adaptive and long-range correlations in self-attention while avoiding its shortcomings. Furthermore, we present a neural network based on LKA, namely Visual Attention Network (VAN). While extremely simple, VAN achieves comparable results with similar size convolutional neuralnetworks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) in various tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation,pose estimation, etc. For example, VAN-B6 achieves 87.8% accuracy on ImageNet benchmark, and sets new state-of-the-art performance (58.2% PQ) for panoptic segmentation. Besides, VAN-B2 surpasses Swin-T 4% mIoU (50.1% vs. 46.1%) for semantic segmentation on ADE20K benchmark, 2.6% AP (48.8% vs. 46.2%) for object detection on COCO dataset. It provides a novel method and a simple yet strong baseline for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network.

Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by thisobservation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multi-modal tasks, and self-supervised learning. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various attention mechanisms in computer vision and categorize them according to approach, such as channel attention, spatial attention, temporal attention, and branch attention; a related repository https://github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions is dedicated to collecting related work. We also suggest future directions for attention mechanism research.

The irregular domain and lack of ordering make it challenging to design deep neural networks for point cloud processing. This paper presents a novel framework named Point Cloud Transformer (PCT) for point cloud learning. PCT is based on Transformer,which achieves huge success in natural language processingand displays great potential in image processing. It is inherently permutation invariant for processing a sequence of points, making it well-suited for point cloud learning. To better capture local context within the point cloud, we enhance input embedding with the support of farthest point sampling and nearest neighbor search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the PCT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on shape classification, part segmentation, semantic segmentation, and normal estimation tasks.