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Neural Networks Are Surprisingly Modular (arxiv.org)
30 points by groar on Mar 14, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They measure whether a network's neurons form tight clusters that talk mostly to each other, then check small image-recognizing networks. Trained and pruned networks showed far clearer clusters than random ones with the same spread of weights, especially when trained with dropout.

Abstract · Pruned Neural Networks are Surprisingly Modular

The learned weights of a neural network are often considered devoid of scrutable internal structure. To discern structure in these weights, we introduce a measurable notion of modularity for multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and investigate the modular structure of MLPs trained on datasets of small images. Our notion of modularity comes from the graph clustering literature: a "module" is a set of neurons with strong internal connectivity but weak external connectivity. We find that training and weight pruning produces MLPs that are more modular than randomly initialized ones, and often significantly more modular than random MLPs with the same (sparse) distribution of weights. Interestingly, they are much more modular when trained with dropout. We also present exploratory analyses of the importance of different modules for performance and how modules depend on each other. Understanding the modular structure of neural networks, when such structure exists, will hopefully render their inner workings more interpretable to engineers. Note that this paper has been superceded by "Clusterability in Neural Networks", arxiv:2103.03386 and "Quantifying Local Specialization in Deep Neural Networks", arxiv:2110.08058!

Daniel Filan, Shlomi Hod, Cody Wild, Andrew Critch, Stuart Russell
arXiv:2003.04881 · cs.NE, cs.LG · submitted Mar 10, 2020 · updated Feb 7, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · 25 pages, 12 figures

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