Deep learning's great success motivates many practitioners and students to learn about this exciting technology. However, it is often challenging for beginners to take their first step due to the complexity of understanding and applying deep learning. We present CNN Explainer, an interactive visualization tool designed for non-experts to learn and examine convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a foundational deep learning model architecture. Our tool addresses key challenges that novices face while learning about CNNs, which we identify from interviews with instructors and a survey with past students. CNN Explainer tightly integrates a model overview that summarizes a CNN's structure, and on-demand, dynamic visual explanation views that help users understand the underlying components of CNNs.

To see how we trained the CNN, visit the directory ./tiny-vgg/. CNN Explainer was created by Jay Wang, Robert Turko, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Nilaksh Das, Fred Hohman, Minsuk Kahng, and Polo Chau, which was the result of a research collaboration between Georgia Tech and Oregon State. We thank Anmol Chhabria, Kaan Sancak, Kantwon Rogers, and the Georgia Tech Visualization Lab for their support and constructive feedback. The software is available under the MIT License. If you have any questions, feel free to open an issue or contact Jay Wang.

Abstract: Deep learning's great success motivates many practitioners and students to learn about this exciting technology. However, it is often challenging for beginners to take their first step due to the complexity of understanding and applying deep learning. We present CNN Explainer, an interactive visualization tool designed for non-experts to learn and examine convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a foundational deep learning model architecture. Our tool addresses key challenges that novices face while learning about CNNs, which we identify from interviews with instructors and a survey with past students. Users can interactively visualize and inspect the data transformation and flow of intermediate results in a CNN.