LNCS 8689 - Visualizing and strongUnderstandingstrong Convolutional.pdfVIP

Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks Matthew D. Zeiler and Rob Fergus Dept. of Computer Science, New York University, USA {zeiler,fergus}@ Abstract. Large Convolutional Network models have recently demon- strated impressive classification performance on the ImageNet bench- mark Krizhevsky et al. [18]. However there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. In this paper we explore both issues. We introduce a novel visualization technique that gives insight into the function of intermediate feature layers and the oper- ation of the classifier. Used in a diagnostic role, these visualizations allow us to find model architectures that outperform Krizhevsky et al. on the ImageNet classification benchmark. We also perform an ablation study to discover the performance contribution from different model layers. We show our ImageNet model generalizes well to other datasets: when the softmax classifier is retrained, it convincingly beats the current state-of- the-art results on Caltech-101 and Caltech-256 datasets. 1 Introduction Since their introduction by LeCun et al. [20] in the early 1990’s, Convolutional Networks (convnets) have demonstrated excellent performance at tasks such as hand-written digit classification and face detection. In the last 18 months, sev- eral papers have shown that they can also deliver outstanding performance on more challenging visual classification tasks. Ciresan et al. [4] demonstrate state-of- the-art performance on NORB and CIFAR-10 datasets. Most notably, Krizhevsky et al. [18] show record beating performance on the ImageNet 2012 classification be