HSMLA: Hierarchical Softmax Multi-scale Linear Attention for Efficient Vision Transformers
Dong Liu, Yanxuan Yu, Renata Borovica-Gajic, Tong Geng, Ying Nian Wu
Abstract
Vision transformers face significant computational overheads in high-resolution dense prediction due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Linear attention offers efficiency but sacrifices local context modeling. We propose \textbf{HSMLA (Hierarchical Softmax Multi-scale Linear Attention)}, which combines ReLU-based linear attention for global context, selective softmax refinement for critical local features, and multi-scale token representations via depthwise convolutions. HSMLA achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs: up to $4.2\times$ inference-time speedup across dense prediction tasks, $87.3%$ Dice with $3.2\times$ speedup on CT organ segmentation, and $94.2%$ AUC with $4.1\times$ speedup on pathology WSI.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.