PSAFM: A parameter-free spatial attention fusion module

Guangjun Liu, Xiaoping Xu, Bingkun Zhou, Feng Wang, Yike Li · 2026

Read PSAFM: A parameter-free spatial attention fusion module by Guangjun Liu, Xiaoping Xu, Bingkun Zhou, Feng Wang, Yike Li (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13577465.txt.

Description

Guangjun Liu and four co-authors design an attention module for image networks that adds no new learnable parameters at all. Attention usually costs weights and computation, which hurts lightweight models. Their module fuses average-pooling and max-pooling branches with fixed weights, then derives three-dimensional attention from channel statistics passed through a tanh function.

Tested on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 across ResNet, Pre-ResNet, and MobileNetV2 backbones, it took best accuracy in most settings. Gains over the plain backbones ran from a third of a point to nearly two points. Parameter count stayed essentially unchanged and computing cost rose only slightly. The authors pitch it as a plug-and-play upgrade for efficient networks.

Catalog record

CREATORGuangjun Liu, Xiaoping Xu, Bingkun Zhou, Feng Wang, Yike Li
YEAR2026
COLLECTIONPAPERS
FORMATTXT
FILE SIZE30 KB
VERSION1.0
LICENSECC BY 4.0
RIGHTSCC BY
SOURCEEurope PMC

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13577465

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