Atlas: Multi-Scale Attention Improves Long Context Image Modeling
Authors: name: Kumar Krishna Agrawal; name: Long Lian; name: Longchao Liu; name: Natalia Harguindeguy; name: Boyi Li; name: Alexander Bick; name: Maggie Chung; name: Trevor Darrell; name: Adam Yala
Published: 2025-03-16 04:52:13

Abstract: Efficiently modeling massive images is a long-standing challenge in machine
learning. To this end, we introduce Multi-Scale Attention (MSA). MSA relies on
two key ideas, (i) multi-scale representations (ii) bi-directional cross-scale
communication. MSA creates O(log N) scales to represent the image across
progressively coarser features and leverages cross-attention to propagate
information across scales. We then introduce Atlas, a novel neural network
architecture based on MSA. We demonstrate that Atlas significantly improves the
compute-performance tradeoff of long-context image modeling in a
high-resolution variant of ImageNet 100. At 1024px resolution, Atlas-B achieves
91.04% accuracy, comparable to ConvNext-B (91.92%) while being 4.3x faster.
Atlas is 2.95x faster and 7.38% better than FasterViT, 2.25x faster and 4.96%
better than LongViT. In comparisons against MambaVision-S, we find Atlas-S
achieves 5%, 16% and 32% higher accuracy at 1024px, 2048px and 4096px
respectively, while obtaining similar runtimes. Code for reproducing our
experiments and pretrained models is available at
https://github.com/yalalab/atlas.