CNNComparator: Comparative Analytics of Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in many image recognition tasks due to their extraordinary performance. However, training a good CNN model can still be a challenging task. In a training process, a CNN model typically learns a large number of parameters over time, which usually results in different performance. Often, it is difficult to explore the relationships between the learned parameters and the model performance due to a large number of parameters and different random initializations. In this paper, we present a visual analytics approach to compare two different snapshots of a trained CNN model taken after different numbers of epochs, so as to provide some insight into the design or the training of a better CNN model. Our system compares snapshots by exploring the differences in operation parameters and the corresponding blob data at different levels. A case study has been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.