# Context-Aware Semantic Segmentation via Stage-Wise Attention

Source: [Context-Aware Semantic Segmentation via Stage-Wise Attention](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/696dba66e25ad2fa9d1ecb93>)

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

Data updated: 2026-04-15T05:00:04.591Z

Authors: Antoine Carreaud, Elias Naha, Arthur Chansel, Nina Lahellec, Jan Skaloud, Adrien Gressin

Published: 2026-01-16T14:06:46.000Z

## Abstract

Semantic ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image segmentation is essential in remote sensing applications such as aerial mapping and environmental monitoring. Transformer-based models remain challenging in this setting because memory grows quadratically with the number of tokens, limiting either spatial resolution or contextual scope. We introduce CASWiT (Context-Aware Stage-Wise Transformer), a dual-branch Swin-based architecture that injects low-resolution contextual information into fine-grained high-resolution features through lightweight stage-wise cross-attention. To strengthen cross-scale learning, we also propose a SimMIM-style pretraining strategy based on masked reconstruction of the high-resolution image. Extensive experiments on the large-scale FLAIR-HUB aerial dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of CASWiT. Under our RGB-only UHR protocol, CASWiT reaches 66.37% mIoU with a SegFormer decoder, improving over strong RGB baselines while also improving boundary quality. On the URUR benchmark, CASWiT reaches 49.2% mIoU under the official evaluation protocol, and it also transfers effectively to medical UHR segmentation benchmarks. Code and pretrained models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/heig-vd-geo/caswit

## 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/2601.11310>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11310.pdf>)
