On the representativeness of convolutional neural networks layers

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are the most popular of deep network models due to their applicability and success in image processing. Although plenty of effort has been made in designing and training better discriminative CNNs, little is yet known about the internal features these models learn. Questions like, what specific knowledge is coded within CNN layers, and how can it be used for other purposes besides discrimination, remain to be answered. To advance in the resolution of these questions, in this work we extract features from CNN layers, building vector representations from CNN activations. The resultant vector embedding is used to represent first images and then known image classes. On those representations we perform an unsupervised clustering process, with the goal of studying the hidden semantics captured in the embedding space. Several abstract entities untaught to the network emerge in this process, effectively defining a taxonomy of knowledge as perceived by the CNN. We evaluate and interpret these sets using WordNet, while studying the different behaviours exhibited by the layers of a CNN model according to their depth. Our results indicate that, while top (i.e., deeper) layers provide the most representative space, low layers also define descriptive dimensions.