arXiv AI
Oct 27

ACSAN: All-Convolutional Self-Attention Network Integrating Convolutional Operations with Vision Transformer

The paper introduces ACSAN, an All‑Convolutional Self‑Attention Network that replaces the fully‑connected matrix multiplications of Vision Transformers with convolution operations. Its core module, Dynamic Convolutional Self‑Attention (DCSA), uses multi‑scale dilated convolutions to produce Query, Key, and Value tensors, and combines spatial and channel self‑attention into a single output. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and ImageNet‑1k demonstrate that ACSAN attains competitive or superior classification accuracy to ViT while using comparable or fewer parameters, and ablation studies confirm the positive contribution of each component.

By Zimian Wei, Tianqi Zhang, Hengyue Pan