PVG: Progressive Vision Graph for Vision Recognition

TL;DR

The paper introduces PVG, a novel graph-based vision recognition architecture that improves irregular object capturing, reduces over-smoothing, and outperforms state-of-the-art models on benchmarks.

Contribution

PVG presents a progressive graph construction, neighbor information aggregation with MaxE, and GraphLU activation, addressing key limitations of existing vision GNNs.

Findings

PVG-S achieves 83.0% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K.

PVG-B surpasses ViG-B by 0.5% accuracy.

PVG improves object detection metrics on COCO dataset.

Abstract

Convolution-based and Transformer-based vision backbone networks process images into the grid or sequence structures, respectively, which are inflexible for capturing irregular objects. Though Vision GNN (ViG) adopts graph-level features for complex images, it has some issues, such as inaccurate neighbor node selection, expensive node information aggregation calculation, and over-smoothing in the deep layers. To address the above problems, we propose a Progressive Vision Graph (PVG) architecture for vision recognition task. Compared with previous works, PVG contains three main components: 1) Progressively Separated Graph Construction (PSGC) to introduce second-order similarity by gradually increasing the channel of the global graph branch and decreasing the channel of local branch as the layer deepens; 2) Neighbor nodes information aggregation and update module by using Max pooling and mathematical Expectation (MaxE) to aggregate rich neighbor information; 3) Graph error Linear Unit (GraphLU) to enhance low-value information in a relaxed form to reduce the compression of image detail information for alleviating the over-smoothing. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of PVG over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., our PVG-S obtains 83.0% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K that surpasses GNN-based ViG-S by +0.9 with the parameters reduced by 18.5%, while the largest PVG-B obtains 84.2% that has +0.5 improvement than ViG-B. Furthermore, our PVG-S obtains +1.3 box AP and +0.4 mask AP gains than ViG-S on COCO dataset.