Fraesormer: Learning Adaptive Sparse Transformer for Efficient Food Recognition

Abstract

In recent years, Transformer has witnessed significant progress in food recognition. However, most existing approaches still face two critical challenges in lightweight food recognition: (1) the quadratic complexity and redundant feature representation from interactions with irrelevant tokens; (2) static feature recognition and single-scale representation, which overlook the unstructured, non-fixed nature of food images and the need for multi-scale features. To address these, we propose an adaptive and efficient sparse Transformer architecture (Fraesormer) with two core designs: Adaptive Top-k Sparse Partial Attention (ATK-SPA) and Hierarchical Scale-Sensitive Feature Gating Network (HSSFGN). ATK-SPA uses a learnable Gated Dynamic Top-K Operator (GDTKO) to retain critical attention scores, filtering low query-key matches that hinder feature aggregation. It also introduces a partial channel mechanism to reduce redundancy and promote expert information flow, enabling local-global collaborative modeling. HSSFGN employs gating mechanism to achieve multi-scale feature representation, enhancing contextual semantic information. Extensive experiments show that Fraesormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. code is available at https://zs1314.github.io/Fraesormer.