# Generic Interpretation Approach for Transformer Models Incorporating Heterogenous Attention Structures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27458 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27458/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15679/) (2021)
- [Layer-wise Relevance Propagation for Neural Networks with Local Renormalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00825/) (2016)
- [Learning Shared Semantic Space for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03095/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Self-Attention Networks for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13377/) (2019)
- [ViT-CX: Causal Explanation of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03064/) (2022)
- [Deep Integrated Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15368/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer has significantly propelled the development of artificial intelligence, and certainly the development of agents as well. We categorize attention structures of Transformer into two types based on the source of the input information: homogenous and heterogenous attention structures. Heterogenous attention structures, with co-attention as a typical example, process information from different sources. Heterogenous attention structure is the foundation for Transformer models to achieve more complex functions and integrate more modal information. Whether for research purposes or policy requirements, the interpretation of Transformer models with heterogenous attention structures is an important task. The fusion of information from different sources brings new challenges. Our work mainly includes two parts: method and experimentation. In terms of method, we propose an interpretation method for Transformer models with heterogenous attention structures. In terms of experimentation, based on our experimental analysis paradigm, we interpret the operating mechanisms of representative models, conduct semantic interpretation and logical interpretation.