The Explainability Illusion: Must ViTs Exhibit Patch-Decoding Interpretability?
Transformers are widely assumed to exhibit token-decoding explainability. In particular, in vision transformer (ViT) classifiers, decoding individual patch tokens has become a common diagnostic tool due to its tendency to yield human-interpretable outputs. In light of the increasing popularity of this approach, an important question is whether token-decoding explainability is an inherent property of transformers that should be expected to hold across architectures, scales, and training objectives, or merely an artifact of some implicit bias. In this paper we systematically study token-decoding explainability across diverse ViT settings, spanning architectures, scales, and training objecti...
| Authors | Ronen Schaffer, Hila Manor, Tomer Michaeli |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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