Causal-ViT: Robust Vision Transformer by causal intervention

Abstract

Artificial intelligence based on deep learning is better at improving the representation ability of models from data. However, due to the limitation of fixed receptive field, these agents are not able to provide a correct response outside the fixed receptive field. To address this problem, this paper provides a new perspective with improving the Image Recognition tasks. This study firstly constructs two extended receptive fields using structural causal model. Then, an approximate intervention method that changes the traditional likelihood prediction to predict the result of causal intervention is proposed. Finally, this study formulates the objective function to adapt the proxy training, which makes the whole model work well. Above all of these, a new Vision Transformer variant named Causal-ViT is proposed. Furthermore, rich experimental results of different tasks are reported. These results show that the proposed perspective makes a significant improvement in Image Recognition tasks. By simply plugging Causal-ViT to different sub-tasks, all of them bring the new benchmarks of themselves field, which proves our method is flexible.