Patch Correspondences for Interpreting Pixel-level CNNs

Abstract: We present compositional nearest neighbors (CompNN), a simple approach to visually interpreting distributed representations learned by a convolutional neural network (CNN) for pixel-level tasks (e.g., image synthesis and segmentation). It does so by reconstructing both a CNN's input and output image by copy-pasting corresponding patches from the training set with similar feature embeddings. To do so efficiently, it makes of a patch-match-based algorithm that exploits the fact that the patch representations learned by a CNN for pixel level tasks vary smoothly. Finally, we show that CompNN can be used to establish semantic correspondences between two images and control properties of the output image by modifying the images contained in the training set. We present qualitative and quantitative experiments for semantic segmentation and image-to-image translation that demonstrate that CompNN is a good tool for interpreting the embeddings learned by pixel-level CNNs.