Convolutional Initialization for Data-Efficient Vision Transformers
Jianqiao Zheng Xueqian Li Simon Lucey
Training vision transformer networks on small datasets poses challenges. In
contrast, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can achieve state-of-the-art
performance by leveraging their architectural inductive bias. In this paper, we
investigate whether this inductive bias can be reinterpreted as an
initialization bias within a vision transformer network. Our approach is
motivated by the finding that random impulse filters can achieve almost
comparable performance to learned filters in CNNs. We introduce a novel
initialization strategy for transformer networks that can achieve comparable
performance to CNNs on small datasets while preserving its architectural
flexibility.