Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks Matthew D. Zeiler and Rob Fergus Dept. of Computer Science, New York University, USA {zeiler,fergus}@cs.nyu.edu Abstract. Large Convolutional Network models have recently demon- strated impressive classification performance on the ImageNet bench- mark Krizhevsky et al. [18]. However there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. In this paper we explore both issues. We introduce a novel visualization technique that gives insight into the function of intermediate feature layers and the oper- ation of the classifier. Used in a diagnostic role, these visualizations allow us to find model architectures that outperform Krizhevsky et al. on the ImageNet classification benchmark. We also perform an ablation study to discover the performance contribution from different model layers. We show our ImageNet model generalizes well to other datasets: when the softmax classifier is retra
