Paper ID: 2404.14996

CA-Stream: Attention-based pooling for interpretable image recognition

Felipe Torres, Hanwei Zhang, Ronan Sicre, Stéphane Ayache, Yannis Avrithis

Explanations obtained from transformer-based architectures in the form of raw attention, can be seen as a class-agnostic saliency map. Additionally, attention-based pooling serves as a form of masking the in feature space. Motivated by this observation, we design an attention-based pooling mechanism intended to replace Global Average Pooling (GAP) at inference. This mechanism, called Cross-Attention Stream (CA-Stream), comprises a stream of cross attention blocks interacting with features at different network depths. CA-Stream enhances interpretability in models, while preserving recognition performance.

Submitted: Apr 23, 2024