Probing clustering in neural network representations

Neural network representations contain structure beyond what was present in the training labels. For instance, representations of images that are visually or semantically similar tend to lie closer to each other than to dissimilar images, regardless of their labels. Clustering these representations can thus provide insights into dataset properties as well as the network internals. In this work, we study how the many design choices involved in neural network training affect the clusters formed in the hidden representations. To do so, we establish an evaluation setup based on the BREEDS hierarchy, for the task of subclass clustering after training models with only superclass information. We isolate the training dataset and architecture as important factors affecting clusterability. Datasets with labeled classes consisting of unrelated subclasses yield much better clusterability than those following a natural hierarchy. When using pretrained models to cluster representations on downstream datasets, models pretrained on subclass labels provide better clusterability than models pretrained on superclass labels, but only when there is a high degree of domain overlap between the pretraining and downstream data. Architecturally, we find that normalization strategies affect which layers yield the best clustering performance, and, surprisingly, Vision Transformers attain lower subclass clusterability than ResNets.