Inhibited Self-Attention: Sharpening Focus in Vision Transformers
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in computer vision tasks. However, their self-attention mechanism often diffuses focus across background regions, relying on spurious correlations rather than object-relevant cues. Inspired by inhibitory mechanisms observed in biological vision systems, we propose the Inhibited Self-Attention (ISA), a novel self-attention that integrates inhibitory signals to enhance feature selectivity and suppress spurious responses. In contrast to conventional self-attention, which relies solely on positive attention values due to softmax normalization, our approach retains and utilizes negative attention scores to suppress irrelevant ...
| Authors | Peter R. D. van der Wal, Nicola Strisciuglio, George Azzopardi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 14 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.