AttentionViz: A Global View of Transformer Attention

Catherine Yeh, Yida Chen, Aoyu Wu, Cynthia Chen, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg

DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2023.3327163

Room: 106

2023-10-24T23:45:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2023-10-24T23:45:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
AttentionViz, our interactive visualization tool, allows users to explore transformer self-attention at scale by creating a joint embedding space for queries and keys. (a) In language transformers, these visualizations reveal striking visual traces that can be linked to attention patterns. Each point represents the query (green) or key (pink) version of a word. Users can explore individual attention heads (left) or zoom out for a “global” view of attention (right). (b) Our visualizations also divulge interesting insights in vision transformers, such as attention heads that group image patches by hue and brightness. (c) Sample input sentences and (d) images.
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Keywords

Transformer, Attention, NLP, Computer Vision, Visual Analytics

Abstract

Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers that allows these models to learn rich, contextual relationships between elements of a sequence. The main idea behind our method is to visualize a joint embedding of the query and key vectors used by transformer models to compute attention. Unlike previous attention visualization techniques, our approach enables the analysis of global patterns across multiple input sequences. We create an interactive visualization tool, AttentionViz (demo: http://attentionviz.com), based on these joint query-key embeddings, and use it to study attention mechanisms in both language and vision transformers. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in improving model understanding and offering new insights about query-key interactions through several application scenarios and expert feedback.