LibraGrad: Balancing Gradient Flow for Universally Better Vision Transformer Attributions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mehri, Faridoun, Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani, Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Mehri, Faridoun
Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
author_facet Mehri, Faridoun
Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
contents Why do gradient-based explanations struggle with Transformers, and how can we improve them? We identify gradient flow imbalances in Transformers that violate FullGrad-completeness, a critical property for attribution faithfulness that CNNs naturally possess. To address this issue, we introduce LibraGrad -- a theoretically grounded post-hoc approach that corrects gradient imbalances through pruning and scaling of backward paths, without changing the forward pass or adding computational overhead. We evaluate LibraGrad using three metric families: Faithfulness, which quantifies prediction changes under perturbations of the most and least relevant features; Completeness Error, which measures attribution conservation relative to model outputs; and Segmentation AP, which assesses alignment with human perception. Extensive experiments across 8 architectures, 4 model sizes, and 4 datasets show that LibraGrad universally enhances gradient-based methods, outperforming existing white-box methods -- including Transformer-specific approaches -- across all metrics. We demonstrate superior qualitative results through two complementary evaluations: precise text-prompted region highlighting on CLIP models and accurate class discrimination between co-occurring animals on ImageNet-finetuned models -- two settings on which existing methods often struggle. LibraGrad is effective even on the attention-free MLP-Mixer architecture, indicating potential for extension to other modern architectures. Our code is freely available at https://github.com/NightMachinery/LibraGrad.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_16760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LibraGrad: Balancing Gradient Flow for Universally Better Vision Transformer Attributions
Mehri, Faridoun
Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Why do gradient-based explanations struggle with Transformers, and how can we improve them? We identify gradient flow imbalances in Transformers that violate FullGrad-completeness, a critical property for attribution faithfulness that CNNs naturally possess. To address this issue, we introduce LibraGrad -- a theoretically grounded post-hoc approach that corrects gradient imbalances through pruning and scaling of backward paths, without changing the forward pass or adding computational overhead. We evaluate LibraGrad using three metric families: Faithfulness, which quantifies prediction changes under perturbations of the most and least relevant features; Completeness Error, which measures attribution conservation relative to model outputs; and Segmentation AP, which assesses alignment with human perception. Extensive experiments across 8 architectures, 4 model sizes, and 4 datasets show that LibraGrad universally enhances gradient-based methods, outperforming existing white-box methods -- including Transformer-specific approaches -- across all metrics. We demonstrate superior qualitative results through two complementary evaluations: precise text-prompted region highlighting on CLIP models and accurate class discrimination between co-occurring animals on ImageNet-finetuned models -- two settings on which existing methods often struggle. LibraGrad is effective even on the attention-free MLP-Mixer architecture, indicating potential for extension to other modern architectures. Our code is freely available at https://github.com/NightMachinery/LibraGrad.
title LibraGrad: Balancing Gradient Flow for Universally Better Vision Transformer Attributions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16760