aiqbench analysis
This research addresses the computational bottleneck of standard Vision Transformers by replacing quadratic self-attention with a Gaussian Mixture Model clustering approach. By grouping similar image patches into fixed clusters via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, the method reduces complexity from O(n²) to linear O(nK). The resulting architecture achieves faster inference for image captioning while maintaining competitive performance on standard datasets like Flickr 30K.
Beyond Self-Attention: Sub-Quadratic Vision Transformers for Fast Image Captioning
arXiv:2606.14753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image captioning is a challenging and significant task that aims to generate coherent and semantically meaningful textual descriptions for given images. To accomplish this task, it requires a deep understanding of visual content along with the ability to express that understanding in natural language. Despite remarkable progress with transformer-based architectures, existing approaches often suffer from limitations, such as a lack of rich local feature representations and the high computational cost of quadratic self-attention. The proposed model focuses on improving computational efficiency by restructuring the vision transformer architecture. In designing this approach, the standard self-attention mechanism in Vision Transformers is replaced with a probabilistic transformer approach based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), a soft-clustering technique. Instead of computing pairwise attention among all image patches, the model groups similar patches into a fixed number of clusters using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This clustering-based mechanism reduces the computational complexity from quadratic O(n^2) to linear O(nK), where K << n. The autoregressive GPT-based decoder is used for caption generation. The model is evaluated on the Flickr 30K dataset, demonstrating competitive and significant improvement over existing works.
Abstract:Image captioning is a challenging and significant task that aims to generate coherent and semantically meaningful textual descriptions for given images. To accomplish this task, it requires a deep understanding of visual content along with the ability to express that understanding in natural language. Despite remarkable progress with transformer-based architectures, existing approaches often suffer from limitations, such as a lack of rich local feature representations and the high computational cost of quadratic self-attention. The proposed model focuses on improving computational efficiency by restructuring the vision transformer architecture. In designing this approach, the standard self-attention mechanism in Vision Transformers is replaced with a probabilistic transformer approach based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), a soft-clustering technique. Instead of computing pairwise attention among all image patches, the model groups similar patches into a fixed number of clusters using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This clustering-based mechanism reduces the computational complexity from quadratic O(n^2) to linear O(nK), where K << n. The autoregressive GPT-based decoder is used for caption generation. The model is evaluated on the Flickr 30K dataset, demonstrating competitive and significant improvement over existing works.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2606.14753 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2606.14753v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14753 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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