arXiv AI

HiLRP: Toward One Trustworthy Explanation for Vision Transformer: Conservation-Valid Attribution via Attention Primitives

HiLRP introduces a unified attribution framework for Vision Transformers (ViTs) that addresses the challenges posed by diverse architectural designs. By decomposing ViT operations into four basic types—linear maps, bilinear mixing, normalization/gating, and reindexing—HiLRP applies conservation‑satisfying relevance rules, enabling reliable explanations across a wide range of backbones. The method outperforms 14 existing attribution techniques on 10 architectures, maintaining conservation and improving localization accuracy (0.97 Pointing) compared to competitors.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 4

SGFormer: Structure-Guided Transformer for Robust Local Feature Matching

Local feature matching is a fundamental component of photogrammetry, enabling accurate image correspondence critical for tasks such as 3D reconstruction, stereo mapping, and visual localization. While recent detector-free matching methods, like LoFTR, have advanced the field, the global features obtained by leveraging the global-range modeling capacity of the unconstrained attention mechanism compromise the model's attention to the salient structures in certain scenarios.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Retrieval Heads Meet Vision: Uncovering How VLMs Locate and Extract Visual Information

The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.

By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Gradient-Skipping Relevance Propagation for Efficient Explainability of Vision Transformers

arXiv:2607. 10365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) are difficult to interpret because current methods of relevance propagation and attention flow do not fully consider some key architectural features, such as the uneven importance of attention heads and residual connections.

By Christopher Buratti, Michele Marchetti, Federica Parlapiano, Davide Traini, Domenico Ursino, Luca Virgili