Deep neural networks progressively transform their inputs across multiple processing layers. What are the geometrical properties of the representations learned by these networks? Here we study the intrinsic dimensionality (ID) of data-representations, i.e. the minimal number of parameters needed to describe a representation. We find that, in a trained network, the ID is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of units in each layer. Across layers, the ID first increases and then progressively decreases in the final layers. Remarkably, the ID of the last hidden layer predicts classification accuracy on the test set. These results can neither be found by linear dimensionality estimates (e.g., with principal component analysis), nor in representations that had been artificially linearized. They are neither found in untrained networks, nor in networks that are trained on randomized labels. This suggests that neural networks that can generalize are those that transform the data into low-dimensional, but not necessarily flat manifolds.

研究了深度神经网络的几何属性和数据表示的内在维度，发现最后一个隐藏层的内在维度预测测试集合的分类准确性，这证明了可以广泛应用的神经网络是将数据转换为低维非线性流形的网络。

深度神经网络中数据表示的内在维度