Hyperplane Arrangements of Trained ConvNets Are Biased

Understand

We investigate the geometric properties of the functions learned by trained ConvNets in the preactivation space of their convolutional layers, by performing an empirical study of hyperplane arrangements induced by a convolutional layer.

• We introduce statistics over the weights of a trained network to study local arrangements and relate them to the training dynamics.
• We observe that trained ConvNets show a significant statistical bias towards regular hyperplane configurations.
• Furthermore, we find that layers showing biased configurations are critical to validation performance for the architectures considered, trained on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet.