Understanding Transformer-based Vision Models through Inversion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rathjens, Jan, Reyhanian, Shirin, Kappel, David, Wiskott, Laurenz
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Rathjens, Jan
Reyhanian, Shirin
Kappel, David
Wiskott, Laurenz
author_facet Rathjens, Jan
Reyhanian, Shirin
Kappel, David
Wiskott, Laurenz
contents Understanding the mechanisms underlying deep neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning and computer vision. One promising, yet only preliminarily explored approach, is feature inversion, which attempts to reconstruct images from intermediate representations using trained inverse neural networks. In this study, we revisit feature inversion, introducing a novel, modular variation that enables significantly more efficient application of the technique. We demonstrate how our method can be systematically applied to the large-scale transformer-based vision models, Detection Transformer and Vision Transformer, and how reconstructed images can be qualitatively interpreted in a meaningful way. We further quantitatively evaluate our method, thereby uncovering underlying mechanisms of representing image features that emerge in the two transformer architectures. Our analysis reveals key insights into how these models encode contextual shape and image details, how their layers correlate, and their robustness against color perturbations. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of transformer-based vision models and their internal representations. The code for reproducing our experiments is available at github.com/wiskott-lab/inverse-tvm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_06534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Transformer-based Vision Models through Inversion
Rathjens, Jan
Reyhanian, Shirin
Kappel, David
Wiskott, Laurenz
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Understanding the mechanisms underlying deep neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning and computer vision. One promising, yet only preliminarily explored approach, is feature inversion, which attempts to reconstruct images from intermediate representations using trained inverse neural networks. In this study, we revisit feature inversion, introducing a novel, modular variation that enables significantly more efficient application of the technique. We demonstrate how our method can be systematically applied to the large-scale transformer-based vision models, Detection Transformer and Vision Transformer, and how reconstructed images can be qualitatively interpreted in a meaningful way. We further quantitatively evaluate our method, thereby uncovering underlying mechanisms of representing image features that emerge in the two transformer architectures. Our analysis reveals key insights into how these models encode contextual shape and image details, how their layers correlate, and their robustness against color perturbations. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of transformer-based vision models and their internal representations. The code for reproducing our experiments is available at github.com/wiskott-lab/inverse-tvm.
title Understanding Transformer-based Vision Models through Inversion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06534