Clustering units in neural networks: upstream vs downstream information

Published: 13 Jun 2022, Last Modified: 28 Feb 2023Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Abstract: It has been hypothesized that some form of "modular" structure in artificial neural networks should be useful for learning, compositionality, and generalization. However, defining and quantifying modularity remains an open problem. We cast the problem of detecting functional modules into the problem of detecting clusters of similar-functioning units. This begs the question of what makes two units functionally similar. For this, we consider two broad families of methods: those that define similarity based on how units respond to structured variations in inputs ("upstream"), and those based on how variations in hidden unit activations affect outputs ("downstream"). We conduct an empirical study quantifying modularity of hidden layer representations of a collection of feedforward networks trained on classification tasks, across a range of hyperparameters. For each model, we quantify pairwise associations between hidden units in each layer using a variety of both upstream and downstream measures, then cluster them by maximizing their "modularity score" using established tools from network science. We find two surprising results: first, dropout dramatically increased modularity, while other forms of weight regularization had more modest effects. Second, although we observe that there is usually good agreement about clusters within both upstream methods and downstream methods, there is little agreement about the cluster assignments across these two families of methods. This has important implications for representation-learning, as it suggests that finding modular representations that reflect structure in inputs (e.g. disentanglement) may be a distinct goal from learning modular representations that reflect structure in outputs (e.g. compositionality).
Submission Length: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)
Changes Since Last Submission: Camera-ready changes; the paper is now de-anonymized and includes a link to code on GitHub.
Code: https://github.com/KordingLab/clustering-units-upstream-downstream
Assigned Action Editor: ~Alexander_A_Alemi1
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Submission Number: 18
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