> [HorNet: Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions with Recursive Gated Convolutions](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.14284v2.pdf)
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## Abstract
Recent progress in vision Transformers exhibits great success in various tasks driven by the new spatial modeling mechanism based on dot-product self-attention. In this paper, we show that the key ingredients behind the vision Transformers, namely input-adaptive, long-range and high-order spatial interactions, can also be efficiently implemented with a convolution-based framework. We present the Recursive Gated Convolution (g nConv) that performs high-order spatial interactions with gated convolutions and recursive designs. The new operation is highly flexible and customizable, which is compatible with various variants of convolution and extends the two-order interactions in self-attention to arbitrary orders without introducing significant extra computation. g nConv can serve as a plug-and-play module to improve various vision Transformers and convolution-based models. Based on the operation, we construct a new family of generic vision backbones named HorNet. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection and ADE20K semantic segmentation show HorNet outperform Swin Transformers and ConvNeXt by a significant margin with similar overall architecture and training configurations. HorNet also shows favorable scalability to more training data and a larger model size. Apart from the effectiveness in visual encoders, we also show g nConv can be applied to task-specific decoders and consistently improve dense prediction performance with less computation. Our results demonstrate that g nConv can be a new basic module for visual modeling that effectively combines the merits of both vision Transformers and CNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/HorNet.
\*Models with * are converted from [the official repo](https://github.com/raoyongming/HorNet). The config files of these models are only for validation. We don't ensure these config files' training accuracy and welcome you to contribute your reproduction results.
### Pre-trained Models
The pre-trained models on ImageNet-21k are used to fine-tune on the downstream tasks.
