PKCAM: Previous Knowledge Channel Attention Module

Attention mechanisms have been explored with CNNs, both across the spatial and channel dimensions. However, all the existing methods devote the attention modules to capture local interactions from the current feature map only, disregarded the valuable previous knowledge that is acquired by the earlier layers. This paper tackles the following question: Can one incorporate previous knowledge aggregation while learning channel attention more efficiently? To this end, we propose a Previous Knowledge Channel Attention Module(PKCAM), that captures channel-wise relations across different layers to model the global context. Our proposed module PKCAM is easily integrated into any feed-forward CNN architectures and trained in an end-to-end fashion with a negligible footprint due to its lightweight property. We validate our novel architecture through extensive experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with different backbones. Our experiments show consistent improvements in performances against their counterparts. We also conduct experiments that probe the robustness of the learned representations.