transformers/docs/source/en/model_doc/van.mdx

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# VAN

## Overview

The VAN model was proposed in [Visual Attention Network](https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09741) by Meng-Hao Guo, Cheng-Ze Lu, Zheng-Ning Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Shi-Min Hu.

This paper introduces a new attention layer based on convolution operations able to capture both local and distant relationships. This is done by combining normal and large kernel convolution layers. The latter uses a dilated convolution to capture distant correlations.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

*While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three challenges for applying self-attention in computer vision. (1) Treating images as 1D sequences neglects their 2D structures. (2) The quadratic complexity is too expensive for high-resolution images. (3) It only captures spatial adaptability but ignores channel adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel large kernel attention (LKA) module to enable self-adaptive and long-range correlations in self-attention while avoiding the above issues. We further introduce a novel neural network based on LKA, namely Visual Attention Network (VAN). While extremely simple, VAN outperforms the state-of-the-art vision transformers and convolutional neural networks with a large margin in extensive experiments, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, etc. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network/VAN-Classification).*

Tips:

- VAN does not have an embedding layer, thus the `hidden_states` will have a length equal to the number of stages.

The figure below illustrates the architecture of a Visual Aattention Layer. Taken from the [original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09741).

<img width="600" src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/van_architecture.png"/>

This model was contributed by [Francesco](https://huggingface.co/Francesco). The original code can be found [here](https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network/VAN-Classification).

## Resources

A list of official Hugging Face and community (indicated by 🌎) resources to help you get started with VAN.

<PipelineTag pipeline="image-classification"/>

- [`VanForImageClassification`] is supported by this [example script](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/main/examples/pytorch/image-classification) and [notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/notebooks/blob/main/examples/image_classification.ipynb).
- See also: [Image classification task guide](../tasks/image_classification)

If you're interested in submitting a resource to be included here, please feel free to open a Pull Request and we'll review it! The resource should ideally demonstrate something new instead of duplicating an existing resource.

## VanConfig

[[autodoc]] VanConfig


## VanModel

[[autodoc]] VanModel
    - forward


## VanForImageClassification

[[autodoc]] VanForImageClassification
    - forward