LeMeViT: Efficient Vision Transformer with Learnable Meta Tokens for Remote Sensing Image Interpretation

Due to spatial redundancy in remote sensing images, sparse tokens containing rich information are usually involved in self-attention (SA) to reduce the overall token numbers within the calculation, avoiding the high computational cost issue in Vision Transformers. However, such methods usually obtain sparse tokens by hand-crafted or parallel-unfriendly designs, posing a challenge to reach a better balance between efficiency and performance. Different from them, this paper proposes to use learnable meta tokens to formulate sparse tokens, which effectively learn key information meanwhile improving the inference speed. Technically, the meta tokens are first initialized from image tokens via cross-attention. Then, we propose Dual Cross-Attention (DCA) to promote information exchange between image tokens and meta tokens, where they serve as query and key (value) tokens alternatively in a dual-branch structure, significantly reducing the computational complexity compared to self-attention. By employing DCA in the early stages with dense visual tokens, we obtain the hierarchical architecture LeMeViT with various sizes. Experimental results in classification and dense prediction tasks show that LeMeViT has a significant 1.7 × speedup, fewer parameters, and competitive performance compared to the baseline models, and achieves a better trade-off between efficiency and performance. The code is released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/LeMeViT.