arXiv AI By Philip H. Lee, Parth Padalkar

SpIn-ViT: Designing a Sparsity-Induced Vision Transformer That Is Mechanistically Interpretable

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arXiv:2608. 14922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has recently expanded to Vision Transformers (ViTs), with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) increasingly used as post-hoc tools to decompose internal representations into sparse and more interpretable features.

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arXiv AI
Jun 24

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.

By Jonas Klotz, Cassio F. Dantas, Pallavi Jain, Diego Marcos, Beg\"um Demir
arXiv AI
Sep 2

ViTAMINS: An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers with Synthetic Hard Negatives

ViTAMINS is a method that incorporates synthetic hard negatives into unsupervised vision transformer pretraining to enhance representation quality. The approach is evaluated on ImageNet and a range of downstream tasks—including transfer learning, image retrieval, copy detection, and image/video segmentation—showing significant performance gains. The synthetic negatives also lead to emergent properties, such as representations that encode explicit semantic information and act as strong classifiers, improving over baselines by up to 11.3%.

By Nikos Giakoumoglou, Andreas Floros, Kleanthis-Marios Papadopoulos, Tania Stathaki
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Spikformer V2: Join the High Accuracy Club on ImageNet with an SNN Ticket

Spikformer V2 introduces a Spiking Self‑Attention (SSA) mechanism that removes softmax and uses spike‑based Query, Key, and Value to capture sparse visual features efficiently. It also adds a Spiking Convolutional Stem (SCS) and employs self‑supervised learning (masking and reconstruction) to pre‑train the model before fine‑tuning on ImageNet. The result is the first spiking neural network to surpass 80 % accuracy on ImageNet, achieving 81.10 % with a 172 M‑parameter, 16‑layer model in just one time step.

By Zhaokun Zhou, Yijie Lu, Kaiwei Che, Wei Fang, Keyu Tian, Qihao Peng, Yuesheng Zhu, Shuicheng Yan, Yonghong Tian, Li Yuan