Net2Vec: Quantifying and Explaining How Concepts are Encoded by Filters in Deep Neural Networks

Ruth Fong, Andrea Vedaldi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

158 Scopus citations

Abstract

In an effort to understand the meaning of the intermediate representations captured by deep networks, recent papers have tried to associate specific semantic concepts to individual neural network filter responses, where interesting correlations are often found, largely by focusing on extremal filter responses. In this paper, we show that this approach can favor easy-to-interpret cases that are not necessarily representative of the average behavior of a representation. A more realistic but harder-to-study hypothesis is that semantic representations are distributed, and thus filters must be studied in conjunction. In order to investigate this idea while enabling systematic visualization and quantification of multiple filter responses, we introduce the Net2Vec framework, in which semantic concepts are mapped to vectorial embeddings based on corresponding filter responses. By studying such embeddings, we are able to show that 1., in most cases, multiple filters are required to code for a concept, that 2., often filters are not concept specific and help encode multiple concepts, and that 3., compared to single filter activations, filter embeddings are able to better characterize the meaning of a representation and its relationship to other concepts.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages8730-8738
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781538664209
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 14 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event31st Meeting of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018 - Salt Lake City, United States
Duration: Jun 18 2018Jun 22 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference31st Meeting of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City
Period6/18/186/22/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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