An Interactive Node-Link Visualization of Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks are at the core of state-of-the-art approaches to a variety of computer vision tasks. Visualizations of neural networks typically take the form of static node-link diagrams, which illustrate only the structure of a network, rather than the behavior. Motivated by this observation, this paper presents a new interactive visualization of neural networks trained on handwritten digit recognition, with the intent of showing the actual behavior of the network given user-provided input. The user can interact with the network through a drawing pad, and watch the activation patterns of the network respond in real time. The networks were trained on an augmented version of MNIST, so they excel at categorizing centred upright numbers.