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Model Editing for Vision Transformers
Model editing offers a promising paradigm for efficiently and precisely updating knowledge in pre-trained transformers without costly retraining. While extensively studied in language models (LMs), model editing for vision transformers (ViTs) remains underexplored. Existing methods typically adapt LM-based techniques by modifying the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) modules, overlooking the unique characteristics of ViTs. In this work, we show that ViT predictions are more strongly influenced by the multi-head self-attention (MSA) modules than by the MLPs. Building on this observation, we propose a twostage framework for editing ViTs. First, we identify which attention heads are most responsible for incorrect predictions. Next, we selectively remove the corresponding features to correct the model's prediction. To further balance error correction with predictive stability on unrelated data, we learn a projection matrix that refines the image representations. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world datasets and model editing benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing model editing methods for ViTs, achieving superior generalization and locality.
Conditional Representation Learning for Customized Tasks
Conventional representation learning methods learn a universal representation that primarily captures dominant semantics, which may not always align with customized downstream tasks. For instance, in animal habitat analysis, researchers prioritize scene-related features, whereas universal embeddings emphasize categorical semantics, leading to suboptimal results. As a solution, existing approaches resort to supervised fine-tuning, which however incurs high computational and annotation costs. In this paper, we propose Conditional Representation Learning (CRL), aiming to extract representations tailored to arbitrary user-specified criteria. Specifically, we reveal that the semantics of a space are determined by its basis, thereby enabling a set of descriptive words to approximate the basis for a customized feature space. Building upon this insight, given a user-specified criterion, CRL first employs a large language model (LLM) to generate descriptive texts to construct the semantic basis, then projects the image representation into this conditional feature space leveraging a vision-language model (VLM). The conditional representation better captures semantics for the specific criterion, which could be utilized for multiple customized tasks. Extensive experiments on classification and retrieval tasks demonstrate the superiority and generality of the proposed CRL.
Learning Conditioned Graph Structures for Interpretable Visual Question Answering
Visual Question answering is a challenging problem requiring a combination of concepts from Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Most existing approaches use a two streams strategy, computing image and question features that are consequently merged using a variety of techniques. Nonetheless, very few rely on higher level image representations, which can capture semantic and spatial relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based approach for Visual Question Answering. Our method combines a graph learner module, which learns a question specific graph representation of the input image, with the recent concept of graph convolutions, aiming to learn image representations that capture question specific interactions. We test our approach on the VQA v2 dataset using a simple baseline architecture enhanced by the proposed graph learner module. We obtain promising results with 66.18% accuracy and demonstrate the interpretability of the proposed method.