ConCA: Concentration-Aware Channel Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

Abstract

Lightweight channel attention mechanisms are widely used in image classification, yet their effectiveness in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) remains limited. Most modules summarize each channel by global average pooling (GAP), which captures activation magnitude but ignores spatial concentration, so channels with different spatial distributions but identical means receive the same descriptor. We propose Concentration-Aware Channel Attention (ConCA), which pairs the mean with a shift-invariant negative-input entropy (NegEnt), computed via a softmax over the negated activations, forming a dual descriptor that jointly encodes magnitude and concentration. A depthwise 1-D convolutional multi-layer perceptron (MLP), whose parameter count is linear in the number of channels, maps the pair to a per-channel weight. On six fine-grained benchmarks, ConCA improves over attention-free, SE-Net, and ECA-Net baselines as well as four richer descriptor-based modules under a controlled from-scratch protocol, and it generalizes across eight backbones on iNat2021-mini. These results indicate that the channel descriptor, together with the per-channel gating that maps it to attention weights, is an important but underexplored aspect of lightweight channel attention in FGVR.