{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/attention-as-grounding-exploring-textual-and-1","title":"Attention as Grounding: Exploring Textual and Cross-Modal Attention on Entities and Relations in Language-and-Vision Transformer","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2022-05-01","proceeding":"Findings (ACL) 2022 5","authors":["Nikolai Ilinykh","Simon Dobnik"],"abstract":"We explore how a multi-modal transformer trained for generation of longer image descriptions learns syntactic and semantic representations about entities and relations grounded in objects at the level of masked self-attention (text generation) and cross-modal attention (information fusion). We observe that cross-attention learns the visual grounding of noun phrases into objects and high-level semantic information about spatial relations, while text-to-text attention captures low-level syntactic knowledge between words. This concludes that language models in a multi-modal task learn different semantic information about objects and relations cross-modally and uni-modally (text-only). Our code is available here: https://github.com/GU-CLASP/attention-as-grounding.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.320","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.320.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"attention-as-grounding-exploring-textual-and-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/gu-clasp/attention-as-grounding","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"visual-grounding","task_name":"Visual Grounding"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}