mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Visualizing the Emergence of Intermediate Visual Patterns in DNNs

arXiv 2111.03505 ↗First posted 5 Nov 2021cs.CV cs.AI cs.LGcited by 7

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a method to visualize the discrimination power of intermediate-layer visual patterns encoded by a DNN. Specifically, we visualize (1) how the DNN gradually learns regional visual patterns in each intermediate layer during the training process, and (2) the effects of the DNN using non-discriminative patterns in low layers to construct disciminative patterns in middle/high layers through the forward propagation. Based on our visualization method, we can quantify knowledge points (i.e., the number of discriminative visual patterns) learned by the DNN to evaluate the representation capacity of the DNN. Furthermore, this method also provides new insights into signal-processing behaviors of existing deep-learning techniques, such as adversarial attacks and knowledge distillation.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 50 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2021.

Builds on

50 of 85 references.

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 2; 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 1.

7 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2021What Do Deep Nets Learn? Class-wise Patterns Revealed in the Input Space
  2. 2022Quantifying the Knowledge in a DNN to Explain Knowledge Distillation for Classification
  3. 2023Don't trust your eyes: on the (un)reliability of feature visualizations
  4. 2025SDAKD: Student Discriminator Assisted Knowledge Distillation for Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks
  5. 2021Visualizing the embedding space to explain the effect of knowledge distillation
  6. 2025Foundations and Models in Modern Computer Vision: Key Building Blocks in Landmark Architectures
  7. 2026Relational Knowledge Distillation Brings DNN Representations Close Enough to Humans to Be Aligned Without Supervision
  8. 2022Graph-based Neural Modules to Inspect Attention-based Architectures: A Position Paper