Pros and Cons of Attention in CV

By this point, we’ve gained a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of using attention mechanisms as opposed to convolution operations in computer vision.

The trade-off: Advantages and challenges of attention mechanisms

The key advantage of attention or transformer mechanisms in computer vision is their ability to avoid inductive bias and capture global relationships across various dimensions. However, this comes at the cost of heavy computations, particularly when calculating the attention map, which scales with the square of the image size.