Convolutional Initialization for Data-Efficient Vision Transformers

Jianqiao Zheng; Xueqian Li; Simon Lucey

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arXiv · 2401.12511

Convolutional Initialization for Data-Efficient Vision Transformers

Jianqiao Zheng·Xueqian Li·Simon Lucey

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Abstract

Training vision transformer networks on small datasets poses challenges. In contrast, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can achieve state-of-the-art performance by leveraging their architectural inductive bias. In this paper, we investigate whether this inductive bias can be reinterpreted as an initialization bias within a vision transformer network. Our approach is motivated by the finding that random impulse filters can achieve almost comparable performance to learned filters in CNNs. We introduce a novel initialization strategy for transformer networks that can achieve comparable performance to CNNs on small datasets while preserving its architectural flexibility.

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Jianqiao Zheng, Xueqian Li, Simon Lucey. 2024-01-23. Convolutional Initialization for Data-Efficient Vision Transformers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12511

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