Interpreting the structure of multi-object representations in vision encoders

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Khajuria, Tarun, Dias, Braian Olmiro, Domnich, Marharyta, Aru, Jaan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Khajuria, Tarun
Dias, Braian Olmiro
Domnich, Marharyta
Aru, Jaan
author_facet Khajuria, Tarun
Dias, Braian Olmiro
Domnich, Marharyta
Aru, Jaan
contents In this work, we interpret the representations of multi-object scenes in vision encoders through the lens of structured representations. Structured representations allow modeling of individual objects distinctly and their flexible use based on the task context for both scene-level and object-specific tasks. These capabilities play a central role in human reasoning and generalization, allowing us to abstract away irrelevant details and focus on relevant information in a compact and usable form. We define structured representations as those that adhere to two specific properties: binding specific object information into discrete representation units and segregating object representations into separate sets of tokens to minimize cross-object entanglement. Based on these properties, we evaluated and compared image encoders pre-trained on classification (ViT), large vision-language models (CLIP, BLIP, FLAVA), and self-supervised methods (DINO, DINOv2). We examine the token representations by creating object-decoding tasks that measure the ability of specific tokens to capture individual objects in multi-object scenes from the COCO dataset. This analysis provides insights into how object-wise representations are distributed across tokens and layers within these vision encoders. Our findings highlight significant differences in the representation of objects depending on their relevance to the pre-training objective, with this effect particularly pronounced in the CLS token (often used for downstream tasks). Meanwhile, networks and layers that exhibit more structured representations retain better information about individual objects. To guide practical applications, we propose formal measures to quantify the two properties of structured representations, aiding in selecting and adapting vision encoders for downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interpreting the structure of multi-object representations in vision encoders
Khajuria, Tarun
Dias, Braian Olmiro
Domnich, Marharyta
Aru, Jaan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Neurons and Cognition
In this work, we interpret the representations of multi-object scenes in vision encoders through the lens of structured representations. Structured representations allow modeling of individual objects distinctly and their flexible use based on the task context for both scene-level and object-specific tasks. These capabilities play a central role in human reasoning and generalization, allowing us to abstract away irrelevant details and focus on relevant information in a compact and usable form. We define structured representations as those that adhere to two specific properties: binding specific object information into discrete representation units and segregating object representations into separate sets of tokens to minimize cross-object entanglement. Based on these properties, we evaluated and compared image encoders pre-trained on classification (ViT), large vision-language models (CLIP, BLIP, FLAVA), and self-supervised methods (DINO, DINOv2). We examine the token representations by creating object-decoding tasks that measure the ability of specific tokens to capture individual objects in multi-object scenes from the COCO dataset. This analysis provides insights into how object-wise representations are distributed across tokens and layers within these vision encoders. Our findings highlight significant differences in the representation of objects depending on their relevance to the pre-training objective, with this effect particularly pronounced in the CLS token (often used for downstream tasks). Meanwhile, networks and layers that exhibit more structured representations retain better information about individual objects. To guide practical applications, we propose formal measures to quantify the two properties of structured representations, aiding in selecting and adapting vision encoders for downstream tasks.
title Interpreting the structure of multi-object representations in vision encoders
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09067