arXiv:2608.14922cs.CVcs.AI2026-08

让视觉Transformer的神经元可解释,还能提升分类准确率。

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

论文配图:SpIn-ViT: Designing a Sparsity-Induced Vision Transformer That Is Mechanistically Interpretable
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 训练时同步优化ViT和稀疏编码器,使神经元激活与分类任务对齐。
  • 准确率比现有方法高8.84%,可解释性评分提升近四倍。
  • 生成的规则集更小且更准,适合需要透明决策的场景。

机制可解释性已拓展至视觉变换器(ViTs),稀疏自编码器(SAEs)常被用作后处理工具,将内部表征分解为稀疏且更可解释的特征。然而,由于后处理SAE在ViT已优化后的冻结表征上训练,其潜在特征并未直接对齐下游分类目标。我们提出SpIn-ViT框架,联合端到端训练预训练ViT与改进型SAE,直接将稀疏的块级表征与图像分类对齐。SpIn-ViT学习到语义连贯的神经元激活,能定位有意义的图像区域,同时保持竞争性预测性能。我们在九个图像分类基准上评估该方法,涵盖分类准确率、可解释性量化指标、AI与人类评估。相比先前最先进的后处理SAE方法,SpIn-ViT实现平均分类准确率提高8.84%,AI可解释性评分接近四倍提升,人类评估得分超两倍。进一步利用SAE神经元提取可解释规则集,构建神经符号模型,其平均分类准确率高出5.97%,规则集规模减少58.8%。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

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. However, because post-hoc SAEs are trained on frozen representations after the ViT has already been optimized, their latent features are not directly aligned with the downstream classification objective. We introduce SpIn-ViT, a framework that jointly trains a pretrained ViT and a modified SAE end-to-end, directly aligning sparse patch-level representations with image classification. SpIn-ViT learns semantically coherent neuron activations that localize meaningful image regions while maintaining competitive predictive performance. We evaluate SpIn-ViT across nine image-classification benchmarks using classification accuracy, quantitative interpretability metrics, AI-based and Human evaluations. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art post-hoc SAE method, SpIn-ViT achieves 8.84% higher average classification accuracy, an AI-based interpretability score nearly four times as high, and a human-evaluation score more than twice as high. We further extract interpretable rule-sets using the SAE neurons to create neurosymbolic models which achieve 5.97% higher average classification accuracy while requiring a 58.8\% smaller rule-set than the neurosymbolic models created from the SOTA post-hoc SAE method.

视觉Transformer可解释性稀疏编码神经符号

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