# Vision Transformer with Convolutions Architecture Search

Source: [Vision Transformer with Convolutions Architecture Search](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6c141e209131cea3202b>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:03:49.010Z

Authors: Haichao Zhang, Kuangrong Hao, Witold Pedrycz, Lei Gao, Xuesong Tang, Bing Wei

Published: 2022-03-20T02:59:51.000Z

## Abstract

Transformers exhibit great advantages in handling computer vision tasks. They model image classification tasks by utilizing a multi-head attention mechanism to process a series of patches consisting of split images. However, for complex tasks, Transformer in computer vision not only requires inheriting a bit of dynamic attention and global context, but also needs to introduce features concerning noise reduction, shifting, and scaling invariance of objects. Therefore, here we take a step forward to study the structural characteristics of Transformer and convolution and propose an architecture search method-Vision Transformer with Convolutions Architecture Search (VTCAS). The high-performance backbone network searched by VTCAS introduces the desirable features of convolutional neural networks into the Transformer architecture while maintaining the benefits of the multi-head attention mechanism. The searched block-based backbone network can extract feature maps at different scales. These features are compatible with a wider range of visual tasks, such as image classification (32 M parameters, 82.0% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K) and object detection (50.4% mAP on COCO2017). The proposed topology based on the multi-head attention mechanism and CNN adaptively associates relational features of pixels with multi-scale features of objects. It enhances the robustness of the neural network for object recognition, especially in the low illumination indoor scene.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10435>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.10435.pdf>)
