The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by non-local network are almost the same for different query positions within an image. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further observe that this simplified design shares similar structure with Squeeze-Excitation Network (SENet). Hence we unify them into a three-step general framework for global context modeling. Within the general framework, we design a better instantiation, called the global context (GC) block, which is lightweight and can effectively model the global context. The lightweight property allows us to apply it for multiple layers in a backbone network to construct a global context network (GCNet), which generally outperforms both simplified NLNet and SENet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and configurations are released at this https URL.
To model the global context features, SENet @cite_29 , GENet @cite_23 , and PSANet @cite_32 perform rescaling to different channels to recalibrate the channel dependency with global context. CBAM @cite_36 recalibrates the importance of different spatial positions and channels both via rescaling. However, all these methods adopt rescaling for feature fusion which is not effective enough for global context modeling.
@cite_36 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_23
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We propose Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), a simple yet effective attention module for feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Given an intermediate feature map, our module sequentially infers attention maps along two separate dimensions, channel and spatial, then the attention maps are multiplied to the input feature map for adaptive feature refinement. Because CBAM is a lightweight and general module, it can be integrated into any CNN architectures seamlessly with negligible overheads and is end-to-end trainable along with base CNNs. We validate our CBAM through extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, MS COCO detection, and VOC 2007 detection datasets. Our experiments show consistent improvements in classification and detection performances with various models, demonstrating the wide applicability of CBAM. The code and models will be publicly available. We notice information flow in convolutional neural networks is restricted inside local neighborhood regions due to the physical design of convolutional filters, which limits the overall understanding of complex scenes. In this paper, we propose the point-wise spatial attention network (PSANet) to relax the local neighborhood constraint. Each position on the feature map is connected to all the other ones through a self-adaptively learned attention mask. Moreover, information propagation in bi-direction for scene parsing is enabled. Information at other positions can be collected to help the prediction of the current position and vice versa, information at the current position can be distributed to assist the prediction of other ones. Our proposed approach achieves top performance on various competitive scene parsing datasets, including ADE20K, PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality. While the use of bottom-up local operators in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) matches well some of the statistics of natural images, it may also prevent such models from capturing contextual long-range feature interactions. In this work, we propose a simple, lightweight approach for better context exploitation in CNNs. We do so by introducing a pair of operators: gather, which efficiently aggregates feature responses from a large spatial extent, and excite, which redistributes the pooled information to local features. The operators are cheap, both in terms of number of added parameters and computational complexity, and can be integrated directly in existing architectures to improve their performance. Experiments on several datasets show that gather-excite can bring benefits comparable to increasing the depth of a CNN at a fraction of the cost. For example, we find ResNet-50 with gather-excite operators is able to outperform its 101-layer counterpart on ImageNet with no additional learnable parameters. We also propose a parametric gather-excite operator pair which yields further performance gains, relate it to the recently-introduced Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks, and analyse the effects of these changes to the CNN feature activation statistics.