The Inductive Bottleneck: Data-Driven Emergence of Representational Sparsity in Vision Transformers

arXiv — cs.CVTuesday, December 9, 2025 at 5:00:00 AM
  • Recent research has identified an 'Inductive Bottleneck' in Vision Transformers (ViTs), where these models exhibit a U-shaped entropy profile, compressing information in middle layers before expanding it for final classification. This phenomenon is linked to the semantic abstraction required by specific tasks and is not merely an architectural flaw but a data-dependent adaptation observed across various datasets such as UC Merced, Tiny ImageNet, and CIFAR-100.
  • Understanding the Inductive Bottleneck is crucial for optimizing ViTs, as it reveals how these models adapt their representational capacity based on the complexity of the data. This insight can lead to improved model performance and efficiency, particularly in tasks that require nuanced semantic understanding, thereby enhancing the applicability of ViTs in real-world scenarios.
  • The findings highlight a broader trend in AI research focusing on the adaptability of neural networks to different data complexities. As the field evolves, there is an increasing emphasis on developing frameworks that can dynamically adjust model parameters and structures, such as the Granularity-driven Vision Transformer and techniques for parameter reduction, which aim to enhance the scalability and effectiveness of ViTs in various applications.
— via World Pulse Now AI Editorial System

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