Locality-Attending Vision Transformer

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission14937 Authors

Keywords: Vision Transformer, Semantic Segmentation, Attention Mechanism, Global Average Pooling

TL;DR: A recipe for training vision transformers to learn representations better suited for segmentation

Abstract: Vision transformers have demonstrated remarkable success in classification by leveraging global self-attention to capture long-range dependencies. However, this same mechanism can obscure fine-grained spatial details crucial for tasks such as segmentation. In this work, we seek to enhance the segmentation performance of vision transformers after being trained using the usual image-level classification objective. More specifically, we present a simple yet effective add-on for vision transformers that improve their performance on segmentation tasks while retaining their image-level recognition capabilities. In our approach, we modulate the self-attention with a learnable Gaussian kernel that biases the attention toward neighboring patches. We further refine the patch representations to learn better embeddings at patch positions. These modifications ensure meaningful representations at spatial positions and encourage tokens to focus on local surroundings, while still preserving the model's ability to incorporate global information. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our modifications, evidenced by substantial segmentation gains on three benchmarks (e.g., over 6% and 4% on ADE20K for ViT Tiny and Base), without changing the training regime or sacrificing classification performance. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LocAtViTRepo/.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 14937