Andreas Krug, "Neuron Activation Profiles for Interpreting Convolutional Speech Recognition Models"

The increasing complexity of deep Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) allows to solve complex tasks in various applications. This comes with less understanding of decision processes in ANNs. Therefore, introspection techniques have been proposed to interpret how the network accomplishes its task. Those methods mostly visualize their results in the input domain and often only process single samples. For images, highlighting important features or creating inputs which activate certain neurons is intuitively interpretable. The same introspection for speech is much harder to interpret. In this paper, we propose an alternative method which analyzes neuron activations for whole data sets. Its generality allows application to complex data like speech. We introduce time-independent Neuron Activation Profiles (NAPs) as characteristic network responses to certain groups of inputs. By clustering those time-independent NAPs, we reveal that layers are specific to certain groups. We demonstrate our method for a fully-convolutional speech recognizer. There, we investigate whether phonemes are implicitly learned as an intermediate representation for predicting graphemes. We show that our method reveals, which layers encode phonemes and graphemes and that similarities between phonetic categories are reflected in the clustering of time-independent NAPs. Keywords: introspection, speech recognition, phoneme representation, grapheme representation, convolutional neural networks