Hypergraph Vision Transformers: Images are More than Nodes, More than Edges

Recent advancements in computer vision have highlighted the scalability of Vision Transformers (ViTs) across various tasks, yet challenges remain in balancing adaptability, computational efficiency, and the ability to model higher-order relationships. Vision Graph Neural Networks (ViGs) offer an alternative by leveraging graph-based methodologies but are hindered by the computational bottlenecks of clustering algorithms used for edge generation. To address these issues, we propose the Hypergraph Vision Transformer (HgVT), which incorporates a hierarchical bipartite hypergraph structure into the vision transformer framework to capture higher-order semantic relationships while maintaining computational efficiency. HgVT leverages population and diversity regularization for dynamic hypergraph construction without clustering, and expert edge pooling to enhance semantic extraction and facilitate graph-based image retrieval. Empirical results demonstrate that HgVT achieves state-of-the-art performance on image classification and competitive performance on image retrieval, positioning it as an efficient and adaptable framework for semantic-based vision tasks.