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Recursive vision transformers gained 2.62 points of ImageNet top-1 accuracy for 1.1M extra parameters

AspireAI community · arXiv
Vision Transformers are usually scaled by adding depth or width, which means adding parameters. SoftMoR argues for a third axis: recursion. Instead of training separate layers, it reuses the same weights across recursion steps and learns token-wise weights for combining the representations from each step, instantiated as the Soft Recursive Vision Transformer. On ImageNet-1K, moving from recursion depth T=1 to T=3 lifted top-1 accuracy from 79.83 percent to 82.45 percent while adding only 1.1M parameters, and at matched effective depth SR-ViT beat independently parameterised counterparts with substantially fewer parameters. Results also held on COCO and ADE20K. The caveat is the scope: this is a parameter-efficient scaling result on standard vision benchmarks, not evidence that recursion replaces depth or width for frontier-scale models.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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