用稀疏自编码器拆解视觉模型的飞机识别特征,发现可解释的结构模式。
Analyzing Visual Aircraft Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

- 在飞机数据集上训练卷积神经网络,用稀疏自编码器分解其深层特征。
- 部分特征对应真实飞机部件,且影响分类结果,验证其语义相关性。
- 适合关注模型可解释性与视觉特征分析的研究者参考。
视觉模型在分类任务中表现优异,但其内部表示难以解释。本文研究稀疏自编码器能否将视觉模型的中间表示分解为可解释特征。在FGVC-Aircraft数据集上训练一个ConvNeXt分类器,提取其最后一个特征阶段的空间激活,并在此基础上训练稀疏自编码器。通过顶部激活图像块、激活强度和类别选择性分析学习到的稀疏特征。定性观察显示,多个特征对应可识别的飞机结构和视觉模式。通过输入空间和特征空间消融实验评估部分特征:分别模糊图像块和抑制稀疏特征,测量对类别逻辑值、分类置信度及分类边界的影响。结果表明,稀疏自编码器能揭示部分可解释且与类别相关的飞机识别特征,但也暴露了特征多义性和空间定位粗糙等局限。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.
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