ULTra: Unveiling Latent Token Interpretability in Transformer Based Understanding

Hesam Hosseini, Ghazal Hosseini Mighan, Amirabbas Afzali, Sajjad Amini, Amir Houmansadr

Abstract: Transformers have revolutionized Computer Vision (CV) through self-attention mechanisms. However, their complexity makes latent token representations difficult to interpret. We introduce ULTra, a framework for interpreting Transformer embeddings and uncovering meaningful semantic patterns within them. ULTra enables unsupervised semantic segmentation using pre-trained models without requiring fine-tuning. Additionally, we propose a self-supervised training approach that refines segmentation performance by learning an external transformation matrix without modifying the underlying model. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised semantic segmentation, outperforming existing segmentation methods. Furthermore, we validate ULTra for model interpretation on both synthetic and real-world scenarios, including Object Selection and interpretable text summarization using LLMs, demonstrating its broad applicability in explaining the semantic structure of latent token representations.