Self-attention in vision transformers performs perceptual grouping, not attention
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, a considerable number of studies in computer vision involve deep neural architectures called vision transformers. Visual processing in these models incorporates computational models that are claimed to implement attention mechanisms. Despite an increasing body of work that attempts to understand the role of attention mechanisms in vision transformers, their effect is largely unknown. Here, we asked if the attention mechanisms in vision transformers exhibit similar effects as those known in human visual attention. To answer this question, we revisited the attention formulation in these models and found that despite the name, computationally, these models perform a special class of relaxation labeling with similarity grouping effects. Additionally, whereas modern experimental findings reveal that human visual attention involves both feed-forward and feedback mechanisms, the purely feed-forward architecture of vision transformers suggests that attention in these models cannot have the same effects as those known in humans. To quantify these observations, we evaluated grouping performance in a family of vision transformers. Our results suggest that self-attention modules group figures in the stimuli based on similarity of visual features such as color. Also, in a singleton detection experiment as an instance of salient object detection, we studied if these models exhibit similar effects as those of feed-forward visual salience mechanisms thought to be utilized in human visual attention. We found that generally, the transformer-based attention modules assign more salience either to distractors or the ground, the opposite of both human and computational salience. Together, our study suggests that the mechanisms in vision transformers perform perceptual organization based on feature similarity and not attention.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it