AttentionViz: A Global View of Transformer Attention
Authors: name: Catherine Yeh; name: Yida Chen; name: Aoyu Wu; name: Cynthia Chen; name: Fernanda Viégas; name: Martin Wattenberg
Published: 2023-05-04 23:46:49

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, 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.