# Efficient Masked Attention Transformer for Few-Shot Classification and Segmentation

Source: [Efficient Masked Attention Transformer for Few-Shot Classification and Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7a551e209131cea828d7>)

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

Data updated: 2026-02-05T05:00:04.050Z

Authors: Dustin Carri\\'on-Ojeda, Stefan Roth, Simone Schaub-Meyer

Published: 2025-07-31T15:19:55.000Z

## Abstract

Few-shot classification and segmentation (FS-CS) focuses on jointly performing multi-label classification and multi-class segmentation using few annotated examples. Although the current state of the art (SOTA) achieves high accuracy in both tasks, it struggles with small objects. To overcome this, we propose the Efficient Masked Attention Transformer (EMAT), which improves classification and segmentation accuracy, especially for small objects. EMAT introduces three modifications: a novel memory-efficient masked attention mechanism, a learnable downscaling strategy, and parameter-efficiency enhancements. EMAT outperforms all FS-CS methods on the PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ datasets, using at least four times fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, as the current FS-CS evaluation setting discards available annotations, despite their costly collection, we introduce two novel evaluation settings that consider these annotations to better reflect practical scenarios.

## 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/2507.23642>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23642.pdf>)
