A computer-implemented method for performing computer vision with reduced computational cost and improved accuracy can include obtaining, by a computing system including one or more computing devices, input data comprising an input tensor having one or more dimensions, providing, by the computing system, the input data to a machine-learned convolutional attention network, the machine-learned convolutional attention network including two or more network stages, and, in response to providing the input data to the machine-learned convolutional attention network, receiving, by the computing system, a machine-learning prediction from the machine-learned convolutional attention network. The convolutional attention network can include at least one attention block, wherein the attention block includes a relative attention mechanism, the relative attention mechanism including the sum of a static convolution kernel with an adaptive attention matrix. This provides for improved generalization, capacity, and efficiency of the convolutional attention network relative to some existing models.