We propose a general framework called Network Dissection for quantifying the interpretability of latent representations of CNNs by evaluating the alignment between individual hidden units and a set of semantic concepts. Given any CNN model, the proposed method draws on a broad data set of visual concepts to score the semantics of hidden units at each intermediate convolutional layer. The units with semantics are given labels across a range of objects, parts, scenes, textures, materials, and colors. We use the proposed method to test the hypothesis that interpretability of units is equivalent to random linear combinations of units, then we apply our method to compare the latent representations of various networks when trained to solve different supervised and self-supervised training tasks. We further analyze the effect of training iterations, compare networks trained with different initializations, examine the impact of network depth and width, and measure the effect of dropout and batch normalization on the interpretability of deep visual representations. We demonstrate that the proposed method can shed light on characteristics of CNN models and training methods that go beyond measurements of their discriminative power.

本研究提出了一种称为网络切片的通用框架，通过评估个体隐藏单元与一组语义概念之间的对齐来量化CNN的潜在表示的可解释性。该方法使用广泛的视觉概念数据集来评估中间卷积层中隐藏单元的语义。使用该方法测试单元的可解释性是否等同于单元的随机线性组合，然后将其应用于比较训练不同监督和自监督任务的各种网络的潜在表示。进一步分析了训练迭代的效果、比较了不同初始化的网络的效果、检查了网络深度和宽度的影响，并测量了深度视觉表示的可解释性的dropout和批标准化的影响。结果表明该方法能够揭示超出CNN模型和训练方法辨别能力之外的一些特征。

网络解剖：量化深度视觉表示的可解释性