PolicyMamba: Localized Policy Attention With State Space Model for Land Cover Classification

Multihead self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms often suffer from computational inefficiencies, limited scalability, and suboptimal contextual understanding, particularly in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. These mechanisms struggle to effectively capture long-range dependencies while maintaining computational feasibility due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. To address these challenges, this work proposes PolicyMamba, a spectral-spatial mamba model enhanced with a localized policy attention mechanism. This mechanism reduces computational overhead by restricting attention to nonoverlapping localized regions and enforcing sparsity constraints, ensuring that only the most informative interactions are retained. A hierarchical aggregation strategy further integrates patch-wise attention outputs, preserving spectral-spatial correlations across scales. In addition, a sliding window patch process enhances local feature continuity while mitigating information loss. The PolicyMamba framework integrates spectral-spatial token generation, token enhancement, localized attention, and state transition modules, significantly improving HSI feature representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PolicyMamba achieves superior classification accuracy, outperforming conventional and state-of-the-art methods in land cover classification (LCC) by efficiently modeling intricate dependencies in HSI data.