Elastic Attention Cores for Scalable Vision Transformers

TL;DR

VECA introduces a scalable vision transformer architecture that uses core-periphery structured attention, enabling linear complexity and competitive performance without direct patch-to-patch interactions.

Contribution

This work proposes VECA, a novel vision transformer with efficient linear-time attention via learned core tokens, reducing computational cost while maintaining high accuracy.

Findings

VECA achieves competitive performance on classification and dense tasks.

VECA reduces computational cost compared to traditional quadratic attention models.

VECA demonstrates effective learning without direct patch-to-patch interactions.

Abstract

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong data-driven scaling by leveraging all-to-all self-attention. However, this flexibility incurs a computational cost that scales quadratically with image resolution, limiting ViTs in high-resolution domains. Underlying this approach is the assumption that pairwise token interactions are necessary for learning rich visual-semantic representations. In this work, we challenge this assumption, demonstrating that effective visual representations can be learned without any direct patch-to-patch interaction. We propose VECA (Visual Elastic Core Attention), a vision transformer architecture that uses efficient linear-time core-periphery structured attention enabled by a small set of learned cores. In VECA, these cores act as a communication interface: patch tokens exchange information exclusively through the core tokens, which are initialized from scratch and propagated across layers. Because the $N$ image patches only directly interact with a resolution invariant set of $C$ learned "core" embeddings, this yields linear complexity $O(N)$ for predetermined $C$, which bypasses quadratic scaling. Compared to prior cross-attention architectures, VECA maintains and iteratively updates the full set of $N$ input tokens, avoiding a small $C$-way bottleneck. Combined with nested training along the core axis, our model can elastically trade off compute and accuracy during inference. Across classification and dense tasks, VECA achieves performance competitive with the latest vision foundation models while reducing computational cost. Our results establish elastic core-periphery attention as a scalable alternative building block for Vision Transformers.