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Vision GNN: An Image Is Worth Graph of Nodes (arxiv.org)
57 points by bryanrasmussen on Jun 12, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of treating an image as a grid or line, this system cuts it into patches, links each patch to its nearest neighbors to form a graph, and lets patches trade information. It beat grid and sequence networks on image recognition and detection.

Abstract · Vision GNN: An Image is Worth Graph of Nodes

Network architecture plays a key role in the deep learning-based computer vision system. The widely-used convolutional neural network and transformer treat the image as a grid or sequence structure, which is not flexible to capture irregular and complex objects. In this paper, we propose to represent the image as a graph structure and introduce a new Vision GNN (ViG) architecture to extract graph-level feature for visual tasks. We first split the image to a number of patches which are viewed as nodes, and construct a graph by connecting the nearest neighbors. Based on the graph representation of images, we build our ViG model to transform and exchange information among all the nodes. ViG consists of two basic modules: Grapher module with graph convolution for aggregating and updating graph information, and FFN module with two linear layers for node feature transformation. Both isotropic and pyramid architectures of ViG are built with different model sizes. Extensive experiments on image recognition and object detection tasks demonstrate the superiority of our ViG architecture. We hope this pioneering study of GNN on general visual tasks will provide useful inspiration and experience for future research. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones and the MindSpore code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models.

Kai Han, Yunhe Wang, Jianyuan Guo, Yehui Tang, Enhua Wu
arXiv:2206.00272 · cs.CV · submitted Jun 1, 2022 · updated Nov 4, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · NeurIPS 2022

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Hello! If any of the authors are reading this, what is the difference between doing this as opposed to using attention mechanisms between nodes?
I was wondering the same thing when I first saw this paper
How fast is it compared to those other networks? GPU wall time to classify a single image, or a batch of images? How does it scale?