arXiv Machine Learning By Kim-Cuc Nguyen, Ngai-Man Cheung

Dissecting Representation Structure in Vision Transformers: A Rigorous Architectural Study

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper presents a detailed study of feature representations in Vision Transformers (ViTs), revealing that feature collapse at initialization causes redundancy and proposing a reduction scheme to address it. It demonstrates that entropy and minimum eigenvalue metrics reliably predict generalization, and that token‑space features and linear submodule outputs are particularly informative. The authors develop a proxy that improves ranking of ViT architectures by 18‑48% over previous baselines, enabling the selection of models with higher accuracy at comparable or lower computational cost.

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