PSAFM: A parameter-free spatial attention fusion module
TL;DR
A parameter-free spatial attention fusion module (PSAFM), where the pointwise average- and max-pooling branches are combined by deterministic weighted fusion, which enables the module to strengthen feature responses without adding trainable parameters.
Abstract
Attention mechanisms improve convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by emphasizing informative features, but many existing modules introduce additional parameters, convolutional or fully connected layers, and non-negligible computational overhead. These costs may limit their use in lightweight or plug-and-play CNN architectures. To address this issue, this paper proposes a parameter-free spatial attention fusion module (PSAFM). Specifically, the pointwise average- and max-pooling branches are combined by deterministic weighted fusion, after which channel statistics and a Tanh activation are used to compute adaptive three-dimensional attention weights. This enables the module to strengthen feature responses without adding trainable parameters. We evaluate PSAFM on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 using ResNet, Pre-ResNet, and MobileNetV2 backbones. On CIFAR-10, PSAFM achieves the best accuracy in 8 of 9 tested backbone settings and improves the original backbones by 0.32 to 1.81 percentage points. On CIFAR-100, PSAFM achieves the best accuracy in 6 of 9 settings and improves the original backbones by 0.05 to 1.68 percentage points. In these experiments, PSAFM is compared with representative attention modules. The results show that its parameter count remains essentially unchanged and that only a small FLOPs overhead is introduced. In other words, when model compactness is important, PSAFM is a simple and efficient attention module that improves CNN feature representation.