用语义概念引导微调,让视觉Transformer摆脱背景干扰,提升鲁棒性。
Concept-Guided Fine-Tuning: Steering ViTs away from Spurious Correlations to Improve Robustness
- 通过自动提取物体语义概念(如‘长喙’‘翅膀’)生成掩码,指导模型关注关键特征。
- 仅用一半数据类别和少量图像,就在5个分布外基准上显著提升ViT鲁棒性。
- 生成的概念掩码比传统分割图更有效,适合追求可解释性和泛化能力的研究者。
视觉Transformer在分布外场景下性能下降,主要因其依赖背景等虚假相关性而非语义特征。现有正则化方法多采用简单前景-背景掩码,无法捕捉定义物体的细粒度语义概念(如‘长喙’‘翅膀’)。为此,本文提出一种新微调框架:利用大语言模型无标签生成类相关概念,再由视觉语言模型进行分割,自动生成空间对齐的概念掩码。微调目标是使模型内部重要性图与这些概念区域对齐,同时抑制对虚假背景的关注。该方法仅需一半数据类别和少量图像即可实现显著改进。在五个分布外基准上的实验表明,该方法有效提升多种基于ViT的模型鲁棒性。此外,优化后的注意力图与语义部件对齐更强,为构建更鲁棒、可解释的视觉模型提供了可扩展路径。最终验证,概念引导掩码相比传统分割图能提供更有效的监督信号,支持核心假设。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision Transformers (ViTs) often degrade under distribution shifts because they rely on spurious correlations, such as background cues, rather than semantically meaningful features. Existing regularization methods, typically relying on simple foreground-background masks, which fail to capture the fine-grained semantic concepts that define an object (e.g., ``long beak'' and ``wings'' for a ``bird''). As a result, these methods provide limited robustness to distribution shifts. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel finetuning framework that steers model reasoning toward concept-level semantics. Our approach optimizes the model's internal relevance maps to align with spatially grounded concept masks. These masks are generated automatically, without manual annotation: class-relevant concepts are first proposed using an LLM-based, label-free method, and then segmented using a VLM. The finetuning objective aligns relevance with these concept regions while simultaneously suppressing focus on spurious background areas. Notably, this process requires only a minimal set of images and uses half of the dataset classes. Extensive experiments on five out-of-distribution benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves robustness across multiple ViT-based models. Furthermore, we show that the resulting relevance maps exhibit stronger alignment with semantic object parts, offering a scalable path toward more robust and interpretable vision models. Finally, we confirm that concept-guided masks provide more effective supervision for model robustness than conventional segmentation maps, supporting our central hypothesis.
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