Transformer Scale Gate for Semantic Segmentation

Effectively encoding multi-scale contextual information is crucial for accurate semantic segmentation. Most of the existing transformer-based segmentation models combine features across scales without any selection, where features on sub-optimal scales may degrade segmentation outcomes. Leveraging from the inherent properties of Vision Transformers, we propose a simple yet effective module, Transformer Scale Gate (TSG), to optimally combine multi-scale features. TSG exploits cues in self and cross attentions in Vision Transformers for the scale selection. TSG is a highly flexible plug-and-play module, and can easily be incorporated with any encoder-decoder-based hierarchical vision Transformer. Extensive experiments on the Pascal Context, ADE20K and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that the proposed feature selection strategy achieves consistent gains.