Maximizing the Position Embedding for Vision Transformers with Global Average Pooling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Wonjun, Ham, Bumsub, Kim, Suhyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Wonjun
Ham, Bumsub
Kim, Suhyun
author_facet Lee, Wonjun
Ham, Bumsub
Kim, Suhyun
contents In vision transformers, position embedding (PE) plays a crucial role in capturing the order of tokens. However, in vision transformer structures, there is a limitation in the expressiveness of PE due to the structure where position embedding is simply added to the token embedding. A layer-wise method that delivers PE to each layer and applies independent Layer Normalizations for token embedding and PE has been adopted to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we identify the conflicting result that occurs in a layer-wise structure when using the global average pooling (GAP) method instead of the class token. To overcome this problem, we propose MPVG, which maximizes the effectiveness of PE in a layer-wise structure with GAP. Specifically, we identify that PE counterbalances token embedding values at each layer in a layer-wise structure. Furthermore, we recognize that the counterbalancing role of PE is insufficient in the layer-wise structure, and we address this by maximizing the effectiveness of PE through MPVG. Through experiments, we demonstrate that PE performs a counterbalancing role and that maintaining this counterbalancing directionality significantly impacts vision transformers. As a result, the experimental results show that MPVG outperforms existing methods across vision transformers on various tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02919
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Maximizing the Position Embedding for Vision Transformers with Global Average Pooling
Lee, Wonjun
Ham, Bumsub
Kim, Suhyun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
In vision transformers, position embedding (PE) plays a crucial role in capturing the order of tokens. However, in vision transformer structures, there is a limitation in the expressiveness of PE due to the structure where position embedding is simply added to the token embedding. A layer-wise method that delivers PE to each layer and applies independent Layer Normalizations for token embedding and PE has been adopted to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we identify the conflicting result that occurs in a layer-wise structure when using the global average pooling (GAP) method instead of the class token. To overcome this problem, we propose MPVG, which maximizes the effectiveness of PE in a layer-wise structure with GAP. Specifically, we identify that PE counterbalances token embedding values at each layer in a layer-wise structure. Furthermore, we recognize that the counterbalancing role of PE is insufficient in the layer-wise structure, and we address this by maximizing the effectiveness of PE through MPVG. Through experiments, we demonstrate that PE performs a counterbalancing role and that maintaining this counterbalancing directionality significantly impacts vision transformers. As a result, the experimental results show that MPVG outperforms existing methods across vision transformers on various tasks.
title Maximizing the Position Embedding for Vision Transformers with Global Average Pooling
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02919