VITAL: More Understandable Feature Visualization through Distribution Alignment and Relevant Information Flow

Abstract

Neural networks are widely adopted to solve complex and challenging tasks. Especially in high-stakes decision-making, understanding their reasoning process is crucial, yet proves challenging for modern deep networks. Feature visualization (FV) is a powerful tool to decode what information neurons are responding to and hence to better understand the reasoning behind such networks. In particular, in FV we generate human-understandable images that reflect the information detected by neurons of interest. However, current methods often yield unrecognizable visualizations, exhibiting repetitive patterns and visual artifacts that are hard to understand for a human. To address these problems, we propose to guide FV through statistics of real image features combined with measures of relevant network flow to generate prototypical images. Our approach yields human-understandable visualizations that both qualitatively and quantitatively improve over state-of-the-art FVs across various architectures. As such, it can be used to decode which information the network uses, complementing mechanistic circuits that identify where it is encoded.

Publication
Non-Proceedings Track