Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection

Abstract: In this paper, we study Multiscale Vision Transformers (MViT) as a unified architecture for image and video classification, as well as object detection. We present an improved version of MViT that incorporates decomposed relative positional embeddings and residual pooling connections. We instantiate this architecture in five sizes and evaluate it for ImageNet classification, COCO detection and Kinetics video recognition where it outperforms prior work. We further compare MViTs' pooling attention to window attention mechanisms where it outperforms the latter in accuracy/compute. Without bells-and-whistles, MViT has state-of-the-art performance in 3 domains: 88.8% accuracy on ImageNet classification, 56.1 box AP on COCO object detection as well as 86.1% on Kinetics-400 video classification. Code and models will be made publicly available.