Cosine-Normalized Attention for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ahmad, Muhammad, Mazzara, Manuel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ahmad, Muhammad
Mazzara, Manuel
author_facet Ahmad, Muhammad
Mazzara, Manuel
contents Transformer-based methods have improved hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) by modeling long-range spatial-spectral dependencies; however, their attention mechanisms typically rely on dot-product similarity, which mixes feature magnitude and orientation and may be suboptimal for hyperspectral data. This work revisits attention scoring from a geometric perspective and introduces a cosine-normalized attention formulation that aligns similarity computation with the angular structure of hyperspectral signatures. By projecting query and key embeddings onto a unit hypersphere and applying a squared cosine similarity, the proposed method emphasizes angular relationships while reducing sensitivity to magnitude variations. The formulation is integrated into a spatial-spectral Transformer and evaluated under extremely limited supervision. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves higher performance, outperforming several recent Transformer- and Mamba-based models despite using a lightweight backbone. In addition, a controlled analysis of multiple attention score functions shows that cosine-based scoring provides a reliable inductive bias for hyperspectral representation learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01763
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cosine-Normalized Attention for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Ahmad, Muhammad
Mazzara, Manuel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Transformer-based methods have improved hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) by modeling long-range spatial-spectral dependencies; however, their attention mechanisms typically rely on dot-product similarity, which mixes feature magnitude and orientation and may be suboptimal for hyperspectral data. This work revisits attention scoring from a geometric perspective and introduces a cosine-normalized attention formulation that aligns similarity computation with the angular structure of hyperspectral signatures. By projecting query and key embeddings onto a unit hypersphere and applying a squared cosine similarity, the proposed method emphasizes angular relationships while reducing sensitivity to magnitude variations. The formulation is integrated into a spatial-spectral Transformer and evaluated under extremely limited supervision. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves higher performance, outperforming several recent Transformer- and Mamba-based models despite using a lightweight backbone. In addition, a controlled analysis of multiple attention score functions shows that cosine-based scoring provides a reliable inductive bias for hyperspectral representation learning.
title Cosine-Normalized Attention for Hyperspectral Image Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01763