{"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/emergence-of-segmentation-with-minimalistic","title":"Emergence of Segmentation with Minimalistic White-Box Transformers","arxiv_id":"2308.16271","date":"2023-08-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yaodong Yu","Tianzhe Chu","Shengbang Tong","Ziyang Wu","Druv Pai","Sam Buchanan","Yi Ma"],"abstract":"Transformer-like models for vision tasks have recently proven effective for a wide range of downstream applications such as segmentation and detection. Previous works have shown that segmentation properties emerge in vision transformers (ViTs) trained using self-supervised methods such as DINO, but not in those trained on supervised classification tasks. In this study, we probe whether segmentation emerges in transformer-based models solely as a result of intricate self-supervised learning mechanisms, or if the same emergence can be achieved under much broader conditions through proper design of the model architecture. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate that when employing a white-box transformer-like architecture known as CRATE, whose design explicitly models and pursues low-dimensional structures in the data distribution, segmentation properties, at both the whole and parts levels, already emerge with a minimalistic supervised training recipe. Layer-wise finer-grained analysis reveals that the emergent properties strongly corroborate the designed mathematical functions of the white-box network. Our results suggest a path to design white-box foundation models that are simultaneously highly performant and mathematically fully interpretable. Code is at \\url{https://github.com/Ma-Lab-Berkeley/CRATE}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16271v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.16271v1.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":"emergence-of-segmentation-with-minimalistic","repo_url":"https://github.com/ma-lab-berkeley/crate","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"vision-transformer","method_name":"Vision Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2308.16271","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2308.16271","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2308.16271"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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