Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Facilitates Model Understanding

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has produced a diverse landscape of vision transformers (ViTs) whose pretrained representations support a wide range of downstream tasks. Towards a better understanding of these models, a body of work has assessed the mechanics of their self-attention as well as the types of information captured across their representations, revealing, for example, stark differences between models trained with contrastive learning (CL) and masked image modeling (MIM). However, the total of these advances on model understanding has to date not yet fully permeated a larger community, where, e.g., insights that are specific to CL models are still at times generalized to MIM models. To make model understanding straightforward and intuitive for a broad community, we propose a simple and easily interpretable visualization protocol. Our protocol is based on visualizing unsupervised semantic segmentation results, yet by no means do we focus on top segmentation performance. Instead, our protocol allows us to easily convey model behavior that consistently emerges across images. Benchmarked on a diverse set of SSL models across layers and representations, our protocol allows us to gain novel insights into distinct positional biases and scaling behaviors, including, e.g., strong boundary artifacts in DINOv3-Large model tokens. These novel insights come on top of more easily conveying a range of previous findings. Our protocol further allows us to clearly visually convey and distinguish between positional effects and the closely related but distinct locality bias, the latter being much more extensively studied in the literature so far. Our protocol is publicly available, serving to catalyze further model understanding for a broad community.