# Testing the Channels of Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.03400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03400/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01135/) (2017)
- [Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07875/) (2017)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [Insights on representational similarity in neural networks with canonical correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05759/) (2018)
- [DeepXplore: Automated Whitebox Testing of Deep Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06640/) (2017)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)
- [Manipulating Machine Learning: Poisoning Attacks and Countermeasures for Regression Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00308/) (2018)
- [Convergent Learning: Do different neural networks learn the same representations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07543/) (2015)
- [Spatially Transformed Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02612/) (2018)
- [DeepGauge: Multi-Granularity Testing Criteria for Deep Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07519/) (2018)
- [SemanticAdv: Generating Adversarial Examples via Attribute-conditional Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07927/) (2019)
- [Unrestricted Adversarial Examples via Semantic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06347/) (2019)
- [TensorFuzz: Debugging Neural Networks with Coverage-Guided Fuzzing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10875/) (2018)
- [Semantic Adversarial Attacks: Parametric Transformations That Fool Deep Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08489/) (2019)
- [Morpho-MNIST: Quantitative Assessment and Diagnostics for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10780/) (2018)
- [RelGAN: Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation via Relative Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07269/) (2019)
- [Regularizing CNNs with Locally Constrained Decorrelations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01967/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural networks have complex structures, and thus it is hard to understand their inner workings and ensure correctness. To understand and debug convolutional neural networks (CNNs) we propose techniques for testing the channels of CNNs. We design FtGAN, an extension to GAN, that can generate test data with varying the intensity (i.e., sum of the neurons) of a channel of a target CNN. We also proposed a channel selection algorithm to find representative channels for testing. To efficiently inspect the target CNN's inference computations, we define unexpectedness score, which estimates how similar the inference computation of the test data is to that of the training data. We evaluated FtGAN with five public datasets and showed that our techniques successfully identify defective channels in five different CNN models.