Understanding Neural Networks via Feature Visualization: A survey

Understand

A neuroscience method to understanding the brain is to find and study the preferred stimuli that highly activate an individual cell or groups of cells.

• Recent advances in machine learning enable a family of methods to synthesize preferred stimuli that cause a neuron in an artificial or biological brain to fire strongly.
• Those methods are known as Activation Maximization (AM) or Feature Visualization via Optimization.
• In this chapter, we (1) review existing AM techniques in the literature; (2) discuss a probabilistic interpretation for AM; and (3) review the applications of AM in debugging and explaining networks.