A Visual History of Interpretation for Image Recognition

These first two papers are similar in that they both probe the internals of a neural network by using gradient ascent. In other words, they consider what small changes to the input or to the activations will increase the probability of a predicted class. The first paper applies this to the activations, and the authors report that "it is [possible] to find good qualitative interpretations of high level features. We show that, perhaps counter-intuitively, such interpretation is possible at the unit level, that it is simple to accomplish and that the results are consistent across various techniques."