S2WAT: Image Style Transfer via Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Strips Window Attention
This work addresses style transfer for image processing applications, presenting an incremental improvement over existing transformer-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of style transfer by addressing the trade-off between long-range dependencies and local modeling in transformers, introducing S2WAT which achieves improved performance on representative datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Transformer's recent integration into style transfer leverages its proficiency in establishing long-range dependencies, albeit at the expense of attenuated local modeling. This paper introduces Strips Window Attention Transformer (S2WAT), a novel hierarchical vision transformer designed for style transfer. S2WAT employs attention computation in diverse window shapes to capture both short- and long-range dependencies. The merged dependencies utilize the "Attn Merge" strategy, which adaptively determines spatial weights based on their relevance to the target. Extensive experiments on representative datasets show the proposed method's effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) transformer-based and other approaches. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlienZhang1996/S2WAT.