Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows

🤖 Plain-English Summary

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, called Swin Transformer, that capably serves as a general-purpose backbone for computer vision. The hierarchical design and the shifted window approach also prove beneficial for all-MLP architectures.

🔑 Key Findings

• Challenges in adapting Transformer from language to vision arise from differences between the two domains, such as large variations in the scale of visual entities and the high resolution of pixels in images compared to words in text.
• To address these differences, we propose a hierarchical Transformer whose representation is computed with Shifted windows.
• The shifted windowing scheme brings greater efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows while also allowing for cross-window connection.

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