CAViT -- Channel-Aware Vision Transformer for Dynamic Feature Fusion

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong performance across a range of computer vision tasks by modeling long-range spatial interactions via self-attention. However, channel-wise mixing in ViTs remains static, relying on fixed multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) that lack adaptability to input content. We introduce 'CAViT', a dual-attention architecture that replaces the static MLP with a dynamic, attention-based mechanism for feature interaction. Each Transformer block in CAViT performs spatial self-attention followed by channel-wise self-attention, allowing the model to dynamically recalibrate feature representations based on global image context. This unified and content-aware token mixing strategy enhances representational expressiveness without increasing depth or complexity. We validate CAViT across five benchmark datasets spanning both natural and medical domains, where it outperforms the standard ViT baseline by up to +3.6% in accuracy, while reducing parameter count and FLOPs by over 30%. Qualitative attention maps reveal sharper and semantically meaningful activation patterns, validating the effectiveness of our attention-driven token mixing.

CoMViT: An Efficient Vision Backbone for Supervised Classification in Medical Imaging

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong potential in medical imaging; however, their high computational demands and tendency to overfit on small datasets limit their applicability in real-world clinical scenarios. In this paper, we present CoMViT, a compact and generalizable Vision Transformer architecture optimized for resource-constrained medical image analysis. CoMViT integrates a convolutional tokenizer, diagonal masking, dynamic temperature scaling, and pooling-based sequence aggregation to improve performance and generalization. Through systematic architectural optimization, CoMViT achieves robust performance across twelve MedMNIST datasets while maintaining a lightweight design with only ~4.5M parameters. It matches or outperforms deeper CNN and ViT variants, offering up to 5-20x parameter reduction without sacrificing accuracy. Qualitative Grad-CAM analyses show that CoMViT consistently attends to clinically relevant regions despite its compact size. These results highlight the potential of principled ViT redesign for developing efficient and interpretable models in low-resource medical imaging settings.