CAT: Causal Attention with Linear Complexity for Efficient and Interpretable Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is pivotal in remote sensing, yet deep learning models, particularly Transformers, remain susceptible to spurious spectral–spatial correlations and suffer from limited interpretability. These issues stem from their inability to model the underlying causal structure in high-dimensional data. This paper introduces the Causal Attention Transformer (CAT), a novel architecture that integrates causal inference with a hierarchical CNN-Transformer backbone to address these limitations. CAT incorporates three key modules: (1) a Causal Attention Mechanism that enforces temporal and spatial causality via triangular masking and axial decomposition to eliminate spurious dependencies; (2) a Dual-Path Hierarchical Fusion module that adaptively integrates spectral and spatial causal features using learnable gating; and (3) a Linearized Causal Attention module that reduces the computational complexity from O(N2) to O(N) via kernelized cumulative summation, enabling scalable high-resolution HSI processing. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (Indian Pines, Pavia University, Houston2013) demonstrate that CAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming leading CNN and Transformer models in both accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, CAT provides inherently interpretable spectral–spatial causal maps, offering valuable insights for reliable remote sensing analysis.