TinyConv-PVT: A Deeper Fusion Model of CNN and Transformer for Tiny Dataset
摘要
Transformer has taken computer vision field by storm in recent years and is becoming increasingly popular in both academia and industry. However, the remarkable success is largely fueled by training on massive samples. In real applications, it is not always possible to have sufficient annotated data. When only a small set of labeled data is available (called tiny dataset), Transformer performs far worse than convolution neural network (CNN). Moreover, it occupies large memory footprint during training. Under such circumstances, a deep fusion model has been created by integrating CNN with Transformer architecture. Specifically, Conv-stem is implanted in the first stage of Transformer to reduce memory footprint. Then, the second and the third stages of the Transformer encoder have been modified into parallel structure with integration of CNN. Finally, depth-wise separable convolution blocks are appended to the encoder to enhance feature representation. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of our proposed model, in which it outperforms other popular methods on tiny datasets by sage margins.