CLUENet: Cluster Attention Makes Neural Networks Have Eyes

Abstract Despite the success of convolution- and attention-based models in vision tasks, their rigid receptive fields and complex architectures limit their ability to model irregular spatial patterns and hinder interpretability, thereby posing challenges for tasks requiring high model transparency. Clustering paradigms offer promising interpretability and flexible semantic modeling, but suffer from limited accuracy, low efficiency, and gradient vanishing during training. To address these issues, we propose the CLUster attEntion Network (CLUENet), a transparent deep architecture for visual semantic understanding. Specifically, we introduce three key innovations, including (i) a Global and Soft Feature Aggregation with a Temperature-Scaled Cosine Attention for capturing long-range dependencies and a Gated Fusion Mechanism for enhanced local modeling, (ii) Hard and Shared Feature Dispatching, and (iii) an Improved Cluster Pooling Block. These enhancements significantly improve both classification performance and visual interpretability. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet demonstrate that CLUENet outperforms existing clustering methods and mainstream visual models, offering a compelling balance of accuracy, efficiency, and transparency.