P2T: Pyramid Pooling Transformer for Scene Understanding

This paper jointly resolves two problems in vision transformer: i) the computation of Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) has high computational/space complexity; ii) recent vision transformer networks are overly tuned for image classification, ignoring the difference between image classification (simple scenarios, more similar to NLP) and downstream scene understanding tasks (complicated scenarios, rich structural and contextual information). To this end, we note that pyramid pooling has been demonstrated to be effective in various vision tasks owing to its powerful ability in context abstraction, and its natural property of spatial invariance is also suitable to address the loss of structural information (problem ii)). Hence, we propose to adapt pyramid pooling to MHSA for alleviating its high requirement on computational resources (problem i)). In this way, this pooling-based MHSA can well address the above two problems and is thus flexible and powerful for downstream scene understanding tasks. Plugged with our pooling-based MHSA, we build a downstream-task-oriented transformer network, dubbed Pyramid Pooling Transformer (P2T). Extensive experiments demonstrate that, when applied P2T as the backbone network, it shows substantial superiority in various downstream scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, and visual saliency detection, compared to previous CNN- and transformer-based networks. The code will be released at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/P2T.