Neural network interpretation using descrambler groups

The lack of interpretability and trust is a much-criticized feature of deep neural networks. In fully connected nets, the signaling between inner layers is scrambled because backpropagation training does not require perceptrons to be arranged in any particular order. The result is a black box; this problem is particularly severe in scientific computing and digital signal processing (DSP), where neural nets perform abstract mathematical transformations that do not reduce to features or concepts. We present here a group-theoretical procedure that attempts to bring inner-layer signaling into a human-readable form, the assumption being that this form exists and has identifiable and quantifiable features—for example, smoothness or locality. We applied the proposed method to DEERNet (a DSP network used in electron spin resonance) and managed to descramble it. We found considerable internal sophistication: the network spontaneously invents a bandpass filter, a notch filter, a frequency axis rescaling transformation, frequency-division multiplexing, group embedding, spectral filtering regularization, and a map from harmonic functions into Chebyshev polynomials—in 10 min of unattended training from a random initial guess.