1. A Simple Interpretable Transformer for Fine-Grained Image Classification and Analysis
- Author
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Paul, Dipanjyoti, Chowdhury, Arpita, Xiong, Xinqi, Chang, Feng-Ju, Carlyn, David, Stevens, Samuel, Provost, Kaiya L., Karpatne, Anuj, Carstens, Bryan, Rubenstein, Daniel, Stewart, Charles, Berger-Wolf, Tanya, Su, Yu, and Chao, Wei-Lun
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence - Abstract
We present a novel usage of Transformers to make image classification interpretable. Unlike mainstream classifiers that wait until the last fully connected layer to incorporate class information to make predictions, we investigate a proactive approach, asking each class to search for itself in an image. We realize this idea via a Transformer encoder-decoder inspired by DEtection TRansformer (DETR). We learn "class-specific" queries (one for each class) as input to the decoder, enabling each class to localize its patterns in an image via cross-attention. We name our approach INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), which is fairly easy to implement and exhibits several compelling properties. We show that INTR intrinsically encourages each class to attend distinctively; the cross-attention weights thus provide a faithful interpretation of the prediction. Interestingly, via "multi-head" cross-attention, INTR could identify different "attributes" of a class, making it particularly suitable for fine-grained classification and analysis, which we demonstrate on eight datasets. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly accessible at the Imageomics Institute GitHub site: https://github.com/Imageomics/INTR., Comment: Accepted to International Conference on Learning Representations 2024 (ICLR 2024)
- Published
- 2023