LowFormer

Category: Efficient/Mobile · Code: timm/models/lowformer.py · Architectures: 8 · Pretrained weights: 7 (0 with ImageNet-1k results)

LowFormer is a convolutional transformer backbone designed for hardware efficiency (measured throughput and latency rather than MACs). The E1 / E2 / E3 edge GPU variants are from the journal extension.

Papers

• LowFormer: Hardware Efficient Design for Convolutional Transformer Backbones
• Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Usage

See the Quickstart for loading pretrained weights, image preprocessing and fine-tuning, and Feature Extraction for using the models as backbones.

>>> import timm
>>> model = timm.create_model('lowformer_b0.in1k', pretrained=True)
>>> data_config = timm.data.resolve_model_data_config(model)

Model API support

✓ supported, ✓ (square) works for square sizes only, ✗ not supported, – not needed (the model already accepts any input size). Checked by running each feature on a randomly initialized model (LowFormer with lowformer_b0 at 224), other architectures of the same class are expected to behave the same. See the Model API page for details.

Architectures

GMACs and parameter counts are for the default input size and classifier of each architecture, from the benchmark results.

Pretrained weights

Top-1 is ImageNet-1k validation accuracy from results-imagenet.csv at the listed eval size, - if the weight has no ImageNet-1k result (e.g. pretraining or image-text weights). Classes is the size of the pretrained classifier, none for weights without one.

Citation

@article{Nottebaum2024LowFormerHE,
  title={LowFormer: Hardware Efficient Design for Convolutional Transformer Backbones},
  author={Moritz Nottebaum and Matteo Dunnhofer and Christian Micheloni},
  journal={2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
  year={2024},
  pages={7008-7018},
}

@article{Nottebaum2026BeyondMACs,
  author  = {Nottebaum, Moritz and Dunnhofer, Matteo and Micheloni, Christian},
  title   = {Beyond {MAC}s: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones},
  journal = {International Journal of Computer Vision},
  year    = {2026},
  volume  = {134},
  number  = {6},
  pages   = {295},
  doi     = {10.1007/s11263-026-02873-5},
  url     = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-026-02873-5}
}