summaries: This paper seeks to answer whether modern DNNs are modular and proposes statistical methods to quantify modularity. In this study, DNNs are described as modular to the extent they agree with 2 prototypical conditions of modularity, namely importance (which is mainly captured by the drop in accuracy after removing a candidate module) and coherence (which would measure the extent to which neurons in a single module are .activated by similar features). These proxies for modularity, importance (with respect to task performance) and coherence (degree of specialization), are computed based on two well-known DNN interpretability techniques, namely lesions and feature visualization.

summaries: This work aims to quantitatively evaluate modularity in neural networks (although, as detailed below, I am not sure this is what it ends up doing). To this end, the authors propose to cluster the neurons of the network using spectral clustering applied to a graph that is weighted by similarity between the neurons. They consider two approaches for defining similarity - either via similar responses to inputs (using Spearman or Pearson correlation) or by taking into account the weighted connections (leveraging the learned network weights) between them. There are some technical details regarding the division to layers, exact implementation, and especially the consideration of convolutional architectures (where certain neurons are grouped together along channels), which I will not refer to much here for brevity, but suffices to say that these are all well described in the manuscript and make sense without much need for justification. Once the clusters (or "subclusters" when divided to layers) are obtained, they are evaluated empirically to related them to the network's task. This portion is mostly based on image classification tasks, so clusters are evaluated based on their impact on classification accuracy, their importance in identifying each class, or coherence of visual features captured by them. The results are somewhat inconclusive (more details below), but it is appreciable that the authors do acknowledge this in a well balanced discussion section.

summaries: In this work the authors provide an empirical definition of 'modularity' of trained deep networks. Their definition is ‘automated’ in the sense that is does not require any human identification and evaluation of the specific modules.  The proposed definition consists in the following steps.  1) Construct an undirected graph from the nodes and weights of the trained-network  2) Divide the graph in groups using a spectral clustering algorithm  3)  Define ‘subclusters’ as the sets of all nodes that are in the same cluster and in the same layer  4) For each subcluster compute an *importance* score and a *coherence* score  5) If the sub-clusters are more important and coherent than randomly defined groups of nodes of the same size than the network is said to be ‘modular’.  The *importance* of a group of nodes is computed as the loss of accuracy that results from masking to zero that group of nodes. The greater the loss of accuracy, the greater the importance of the group.  The *coherence* of a group of nodes is computed as the maximum magnitude of the pre-activation weights of the group that is achievable with a single image.  By numerical testing, the authors find that it is indeed possible to find groups of nodes that are more important and coherent than random in a statistically significant way for different architectures.

summaries: This paper uses graph-based clustering methods to identify the humanly comprehensible modularities in the neural network. They thoroughly discussed how they construct the graph of neurons and carry out the clustering. They also proposed the fisher bates p-value for testing the significance of identified modules.

abstractText: A neural network is modular to the extent that parts of its computational graph (i.e. structure) can be represented as performing some comprehensible subtask relevant to the overall task (i.e. functionality). Are modern deep neural networks modular? How can this be quantified? In this paper, we consider the problem of assessing the modularity exhibited by a partitioning of a network’s neurons. We propose two proxies for this: importance, which reflects how crucial sets of neurons are to network performance; and coherence, which reflects how consistently their neurons associate with features of the inputs. To measure these proxies, we develop a set of statistical methods based on techniques conventionally used to interpret individual neurons. We apply the proxies to partitionings generated by spectrally clustering a graph representation of the network’s neurons with edges determined either by network weights or correlations of activations. We show that these partitionings, even ones based only on weights (i.e. strictly from non-runtime analysis), reveal groups of neurons that are important and coherent. These results suggest that graph-based partitioning can reveal modularity and help us understand how deep neural networks function.

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heading: 1 INTRODUCTION

text:
Modularity is a common property of complex systems, both natural and artificial (Clune et al., 2013; Baldwin & Clark, 2000; Booch et al., 2007). It carries advantages including intelligibility and adaptivity. In particular, modularity implies that the structure of a system conveys information about its functionality. This leads us to the following definition: a neural network is modular to the extent that parts of its computational graph (structure) can be represented as performing some comprehensible subtask relevant to the overall task (functionality). We call these parts modules.
There exists a body of research for developing more modular networks which either have distinct architectural building blocks (Alet et al., 2018; Parascandolo et al., 2018; Goyal et al., 2019) or are trained in a way that promotes modularity via regularization or parameter isolation (Kirsch et al., 2018; De Lange et al., 2019; Filan et al., 2021). Yet in machine learning, it is more common to encounter networks whose architecture and training are not guided by considerations of modularity. For example, in computer vision, networks are generally trained end-to-end with all of the filters in one layer connected to all filters in the next. Do such networks nonetheless develop modularity? There is some evidence for this. For example, by methodical manual investigation, Cammarata et al. (2020) discovered modular subnetworks which perform human-explainable subtasks such as car detection via neurons which detect different car parts. More scalably detecting modularity in networks would help us to extend our understanding of their learning dynamics and to expand our interpretability toolbox by suggesting an additional level of abstraction beyond single-neuron methods.
In this paper we systematically analyze the extent to which networks which are not explicitly trained to be modular exhibit it nonetheless. First, this requires a method for breaking down a network’s computational graph into different proposals for modules. For this, we use spectral clustering on a graph representation of the network, using an extension of the methods of (Filan et al., 2021). Second, this requires a scalable method for approximating the degree to which a partitioning exhibits modularity. We do this by applying interpretability tools to clusters of neurons as a way of quantifying proxies for modularity.
Operationalization of modularity: Following our notion of modularity, to say that a subset is a module, one must show that it performs some human-comprehensible subtask relevant to the overall task. Scaling this, however, would be difficult, as it would require a human in the loop. How could measuring modularity be automated? Consider an idealized prototype of a highly modular network that has subsets of neurons, each performing subtasks in which (1) each subtask is necessary for high performance on the overall task, (2) each subtask is implemented by a single subset only, and (3) each subset executes only a single subtask. The combination of (1) and (2) suggests that the removal of one of the subsets from the network would harm performance because the network lacks the implementation of a necessary subtask. We say that such a subset is important. Next, given that neurons are frequently understood as feature detectors, (3) suggests that the neurons in a module should tend to be strongly activated by inputs which contain features relevant to the module’s subtask. We say that such a subset is coherent. Figure 1 provides an illustrative example of coherence in networks that are trained on a task that lends itself to parallel processing via subtasks. Measuring importance and coherence will give us a sense of the degree to which networks approximate these prototypical conditions, despite not perfectly satisfying them.
Results and contributions: To measure these proxies, we utilize interpretability methods that have been conventionally used for single-neuron analysis to study these partitions. We find that the partitions have groups of neurons that are disproportionately likely to be important compared to random groups of neurons. We also find that the groups of neurons in the partitionings are reliably more coherent than random ones, though only with respect to features other than class label.
By showing that our partitioning methods are able to reveal modularity, these results suggest that they can be used to understand deep networks. Our key contributions are threefold:
1. Introducing two proxies, importance and coherence, to assess whether a partitioning of a network exhibits modularity and identify which subsets of neurons are the most responsible.
2. Quantifying these proxies by applying single-neuron interpretability methods on subsets of neurons in an automated fashion
3. Applying our methods on the partitions produced by spectral clustering on a range of neural networks and finding evidence of modularity captured by these partitions.

heading: 2 RELATED WORK

text:
The work most closely related to ours is Filan et al. (2021) who also use spectral clustering to establish that deep networks are often clusterable and investigates what factors influence clusterability. They also introduce a method for regularization for modularity among clusters of neurons. We extend their work by bridging graphical clusterability and functional modularity. This line of work inherits insights from network science involving clustering in general (Girvan & Newman, 2002; Newman & Girvan, 2004), and spectral clustering (Shi & Malik, 2000; von Luxburg, 2007) in particular.
In our experiments we combine clustering with interpretability tools to measure importance and coherence. This highlights the usefulness of combining clustering with interpretability methods for more rigorously understanding networks. We use feature visualization (Olah et al., 2017; Watanabe, 2019) and lesions (Zhou et al., 2018), but in a similar way, other interpretability techniques including analysis of selectivity (Morcos et al., 2018; Madan et al., 2020), network “dissection” (Bau et al., 2017; Mu & Andreas, 2020), earth-mover distance (Testolin et al., 2020), or intersection information (Panzeri et al., 2017) could also be combined with clustering-based partitionings under a similar framework. Relatedly, Cammarata et al. (2020) demonstrate that feature visualization and analysis of weights can be used to identify groups of neurons whose functionality is human-interpretable.
This work adds to a body of research focused on modularity and compositionality in neural systems either at the neuron level (You et al., 2020; Mu & Andreas, 2020; Voss et al., 2021) or at the subnetwork level (Lake et al., 2015; 2017; Csordás et al., 2021). There also exist techniques for developing more modular networks which either have an explicitly modular architecture (Alet et al., 2018; Parascandolo et al., 2018; Goyal et al., 2019) or are trained in a way that promotes modularity via regularization or parameter isolation (Kirsch et al., 2018; De Lange et al., 2019).

heading: 3 METHODS

text:
To evaluate modularity, our procedural pipeline is as follows. (1) We begin with a trained neural network; (2) construct a graph from it, treating each neuron as a node; (3) perform spectral clustering on the graph to obtain a partitioning or “clustering” of neurons which we then further divide by layer to obtain a “subclustering”; (4) analyze the subclusters according to our modularity proxies operationalized by lesioning neurons or feature visualization and comparing them to random subclusters;
and (5) aggregate results across the network to obtain a final p value and effect measure. This pipeline is outlined in Figure 2 and Figure 4, and each step is explained in detail below.

heading: 3.1 GENERATING PARTITIONS WITH SPECTRAL CLUSTERING

text:
To partition a network into clusters, we use an approach based on Filan et al. (2021) which consisted of two steps: “graphification” - transforming the network into an undirected, edge-weighted graph; and clustering - obtaining a partitioning via spectral clustering.
Graphification: To perform spectral clustering, a network must be represented as an undirected graph with non-negative edges. For MLPs (multilayer perceptrons), each graph node corresponds to a neuron in the network including input and output neurons. For CNNs (convolutional neural networks), a node corresponds to a single channel (which we also refer to as a “neuron”) in a convolutional layer.1 For CNNs, we do not use input, output, or fully-connected layers for clustering.
For graphification, we test two ways of assigning adjacency edges between neurons: with weights and with correlations. For weight-based clustering with dense layers, if two neurons have a weight connecting them in the network, their corresponding vertices are connected by an edge with weight equal to the absolute value of the network’s weight between the neurons. For convolutional channels, we connect them by an edge with weight equal to the L1 norm for the corresponding 2D kernel slice. If layers are connected but with a batch-normalization layer in between, we mimic the scaling performed by the batch norm operation by multiplying weights by γ/(σ + ε) where γ is the scaling factor, σ is the moving standard deviation, and ε is a small constant. Notably, this method of constructing the graphs requires no dataset or runtime analysis of the network.
While graphification via weights only results in connections between neurons in adjacent layers, doing so with correlations creates more dense graphs. With this method, we connect the nodes for two neurons with their squared Spearman correlation across a validation set. Spearman correlation gives the Pearson (linear) correlation between ranks and reflects how well two sets of data can be related by a monotonically increasing function.2 Rather than using neurons’ post-ReLU outputs to calculate these correlations, we use their pre-ReLU activations with the goal of extracting richer data from neurons.3 Again, for convolutional channels, we take the L1 norm of activations before calculating Spearman correlations. The fact that we take absolute valued weights or squared correlations to construct edges between neurons in graphification means that our analysis does not discriminate between positive and negative associations between neurons.
In addition to graphification via weights versus activations, we also test two scopes in which to perform clustering: global and local. For global clustering, we cluster on one graph for the network as a whole. For local clustering, we produce a partitioning for each layer l individually by clustering on the graph of connections between l and the layers adjacent to l. Ultimately, we run 4 experiments on each network by clustering {weights, activations} × {globally, locally}. Spectral (sub)clustering: We perform normalized spectral clustering (Shi & Malik, 2000) on the resulting graphs to obtain a partition of the neurons into clusters. For all experiments, we set the number of clusters to k = 16. In Appendix A.6, we reproduce a subset of experiments with k ∈ {8, 12}, showing that results are robust to alternate choices of k. Refer to appendix A.1 for a complete description of the spectral clustering algorithm.
Layers at different depths of a network tend to develop different representations. To control for these differences, we study the neurons in clusters separately per layer. Therefore, for global clustering in which clusters of neurons span more than one layer, we analyze clusters one layer at a time. We call these sets of neurons within the same cluster and layer subclusters. To ensure comparability between these clusterings when performing local clustering, we set the number of clusters per layer to be the same as the number produced in that layer with global clustering. In our experiments, we compare
1This is subtly different from treating each activational unit as a neuron in networks such as ResNets with skip connections. If a unit is used as inputs to multiple layers, we consider these inputs to be separate neurons.
2We use Spearman rather than Pearson correlation because networks are nonlinear, and there is no particular reason to expect associations between arbitrary neurons to be linear.
3Although all negative values are mapped to zero by a ReLU, we expect the degree of negativity to carry information about the possible presence (or lack thereof) of features which the neuron was meant to detect, especially for networks trained with dropout.
these subclusters to other sets of random units of the same size in the same layer. When discussing these experiments, we refer to subclusters from the clustering algorithm as “true subclusters” and sets of random neurons as “random subclusters.” Random subclusters form the natural control condition to test whether the specific partitioning of neurons exhibits importance or coherence compared to alternative partitions, while taking account of layer and size.

heading: 3.2 ANALYSIS PIPELINE

text:
Summary: In our experiments, we measure the degree to which subclusters identified via spectral clustering are more important and coherent than random sets of neurons of the same size and layer. Operationalizations are given in subsections 4.1 and 4.2, but in brief, the measure for importance of a subcluster quantifies the performance reduction from dropping out or “lesioning” the neurons in that subcluster, and the measures for coherence quantify the degree to which the neurons in a subcluster are mutually associated with some feature of an input. For each subcluster greater than 1 neuron in size and which did not include every neuron in the layer, we calculate a measure of importance or coherence and compare it to that of 19 random subclusters for non-ImageNet networks or 9 random subclusters for ImageNet ones. These experiments and measures are discussed in detail in section 4. We present two measures of how true and random subclusters compare under these proxies. First, we test whether true subclusters are disproportionately often more important or coherent than random subclusters, and report a p value for this test, which we call a Fisher-Bates p value. This value is our primary focus. However, for additional resolution, we also calculate an effect measure used to assess the importance and coherence of the ‘average’ subcluster. Importantly, the Fisher-Bates p value and effect measure are based on different statistics and measure different things.
Fisher-Bates p values: We wish to test whether spectral clustering-based partitioning methods find more modular subsets of neurons than simply choosing random subsets. To do this, for each subcluster measurement we take the percentile of each true subcluster relative to the distribution of measurements of random subclusters.4 Next, we use the Fisher method to test whether the subclusters in a single network are disproportionately more modular than random neurons. To do so, we first center the subcluster percentiles around 0.5, which under the null hypothesis would give a granular approximation of the uniform distribution. We then combine the centered percentiles {p1, . . . , pn} into the test statistic −2 ∑n i=1 log pi, which under the null hypothesis is drawn from a chi-squared distribution with 2n degrees of freedom. We can then produce a p value for each network, testing whether this statistic is higher than the null hypothesis would produce, which would mean that there were more low percentiles than if they were distributed uniformly.5 This procedure is illustrated in Figure 4.
For all non-ImageNet networks, we train and analyze 5 different versions of each which requires a second aggregation step. In each condition, we take the mean of the p values for each network and correct it using the corresponding quantile of a Bates(n = 5) distribution6 which gives the distribution of the mean of five independent uniformly-distributed random variables.7
This produces a p value for every network architecture, partitioning method, and modularity metric, which we call Fisher-Bates p values.8 We next correct for multiple testing using the Benjamini Hochberg method (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995), controlling the false discovery rate at the α = 0.05 level. See Appendix A.7 for details. Figure 3 shows which values are significant after this correction.
In summary, (1) we first aggregate each network’s subcluster percentiles using the Fisher method, (2) then we aggregate these new p values among identically-configured replicates of the same experiment using the Bates method, and finally (3) we correct for multiple comparisons using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure.
4For metrics where high values indicate modularity, we take the percentile of the negative metric, so that low percentiles consistently indicate modularity.
5The fact that we coarsely measure percentiles and then center them makes this test conservative, because our statistic is more sensitive to low percentiles than high percentiles.
6The Bates(n) quantile function is Fn(x) = 1n! ∑bnxc k=0 (−1) k ( n k ) (nx− k)n−1 (Marengo et al., 2017).
7We use the Bates method for aggregation here instead of using the Fisher method again because in this case, all five p values are from identically configured experiments, and the Bates test is less sensitive to low outliers.
8For simplicity, we use this name even for ImageNet networks, where we do not have multiple networks to apply Bates aggregation to.
Obtaining effect measures: In addition to p values, we also calculate effect measures which give a sense of how different our results for true and random subclusters are on average. We calculate them by taking the mean of 2x/(x+ µ) where x is a true subcluster measure of importance/coherence and µ is the mean over that of random subclusters.9 We do this as opposed to simply taking x/µ in order to avoid divisions by zero. This results in effect measures in the interval [0,2], and which side of 1 they are on indicates whether the true subclusters are more important/coherent than random ones. For ease of interpretation, note that if 2x/(x + µ) = 1 + y, then x/µ ≈ 1 + 2y for y 1, so an effect measure of 1.05 would mean that the measure of a true subcluster was ≈ 10% higher than the expected measure of a random subcluster. Together with these effect measures, we also report their standard errors.
Differences between Fisher-Bates p value and effect measure results: In some of our experiments, the Fisher-Bates p values and effect measures seem to “disagree” with one suggesting that modularity was detected and the other suggesting it was not. This potential for disagreement is due to the fact that the Fisher-Bates p values are based on the percentile of subcluster measurements relative to the distribution of those of random subclusters, while the effect measures compare the value of true subcluster measurements to the mean value of random subcluster measurements. When the Fisher-Bates p value seems to indicate modularity but the effect measure does not, this means that on the relevant metric, there are more subclusters than would be expected under the null hypothesis whose metric value is higher than that of random subclusters, but the average subcluster has a metric value similar to or less than an average random subcluster. In other words, the partitioning method has detected some subclusters that are modular, but the average subcluster found was not modular. We consider this a positive result, indicating that our partitioning method is detecting some modularity.

heading: 4 EXPERIMENTS

text: To show the applicability of our methods at different scales, we experiment with a range of networks. For small-scale experiments, we train MLPs with 4 hidden layers of 256 neurons each and small convolutional networks with 3 layers each of 64 neurons followed by a dense layer of 128 neurons trained on the MNIST (LeCun et al., 1998) dataset. At a mid scale, we train VGG-style CNNs containing 13 convolutional layers using the architectures of Simonyan & Zisserman (2014) trained on CIFAR-10 (Krizhevsky & Hinton, 2009) using the procedure of Liu & Deng (2015), which includes weight decay and dropout for regularization. Finally, for the ImageNet (Krizhevsky & Hinton, 2009) scale, we analyze pretrained ResNet18 (He et al., 2016), VGG-16, and VGG-19 (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2014) models. Further details including hyperparameters and test performances are in Appendix A.2.

heading: 4.1 LESION EXPERIMENTS

text:
One approach that has been used for understanding both biological (Gazzaniga & Ivry, 2013) and artificial (Zhou et al., 2018; Casper et al., 2020) neural systems involves disrupting neurons during inference. We experiment with “lesion” tests in which we analyze network performance on the test set when a subcluster is dropped out. We then analyze the damage to the network’s performance. First, we measure importance by taking the drop in accuracy. Specifically, let θ be the parameter vector of the neural network, c be a set of neurons,M(θ, c) be a masked version of θ where weights into or out of nodes in c have been set to 0, and Acc(ϑ,D) be the accuracy of the network parameterized by ϑ on dataset D. Then, our measure for importance is Acc(θ,test)− Acc(M(θ, c),test), where test is a test dataset that was not used to construct the activation-based partitionings.
Second, we measure the coherence in a subcluster with respect to class by taking the range of class-specific accuracy drops. Specifically, let testi be the subset of the test set with label i, and let ∆(θ, c, i) := Acc(θ,testi)−Acc(M(θ, c),testi) be the drop in accuracy for examples with label i from lesioning c. Then, this measure of coherence is the range (maxi ∆(θ, c, i))−(mini ∆(θ, c, i)), of accuracy drops over classes. We use this to detect whether clusters are more crucial for some classes over others, which would suggest that they coherently act to correctly label those classes.
We use the analysis pipeline from Section 3.2 to test for importance and coherence using these overall accuracy differences and class-wise ranges. Low Fisher-Bates p values suggest the detection of
9If this value is ever less than 0 for a subcluster, we conservatively replace it with 0.
an unexpectedly high number of important/coherent subclusters. Meanwhile, effect measures > 1 indicate more importance/coherence among true subclusters on average compared to random ones. Figure 3 shows Fisher-Bates p values, and Table 1 shows effect measure data. Results are summarized in section 4.3.

heading: 4.2 FEATURE VISUALIZATION EXPERIMENTS

text:
To further analyze coherence, we leverage another set of interpretability techniques based on feature visualization. We use gradient-based optimization to create an input image which maximizes the L1 norm of the pre-ReLU activations of the neurons in a subcluster. Letting the parameter vector be θ and the subcluster be c, we write Act(x, θ, c) for the vector of pre-ReLU activations of neurons in c in network θ on input x, and denote this optimized input image as x(θ, c), which approximately maximizes ‖Act(x, θ, c)‖1. The key insight is that properties of these visualizations x(θ, c) can suggest what roles the subclusters play in the network. Implementation details are in Appendix A.5, and Figure 7 shows example visualizations.
We use two techniques to analyze coherence using these visualizations of subclusters. First, we analyzed the value of the maximization objective for each image we produced, ‖Act(x(θ, c), θ, c)‖1, which we call the “score” of the visualization. This gives one notion of how coherent a subcluster may
be with respect to input features, because if a single image can strongly excite an entire subcluster, this suggests that the neurons comprising it are involved in detecting/processing similar features. Second, we obtain a measure of coherence by analyzing the entropy H(label | x(θ, c); θ) of the softmax outputs of the network when these images are passed through. If the entropy is low, this suggests that a cluster is coherent with respect to output labels.
Just as with lesion experiments, we perform analysis using these two methods using the pipeline from Section 3.2 to measure how coherent true subclusters are compared to random ones. Low FisherBates p values suggest the detection of an unexpectedly high number of coherent subclusters. For visualization score experiments, effect measures> 1 indicate coherence while for the softmaxH ones, effect measures < 1 indicate coherence. Figure 3 shows Fisher-Bates p values, and Table 1 shows effect measure data. Figure 5 shows histograms of feature visualization percentiles for partitionings of a VGG network trained on CIFAR-10, to illustrate the significance of the Fisher-Bates p values.

heading: 4.3 FINDINGS

text:
Our partitionings identify important subclusters. Fisher-Bates p values for lesion accuracy drops are low and significant, as shown in Figure 3, indicating that sub-clusters are more likely to be highly important relative to random groups of neurons. However, as shown in Table 1, not all of the corresponding effect measures are below one, even when the Fisher-Bates p value is significant. This indicates that when we detect that an unusual number of subclusters are important, this does not necessarily correspond to importance on average.
Our partitionings identify subclusters that are coherent w.r.t. input features but not class label. Class-specific measures of coherence, class-wise lesion accuracy drop range and output entropy, showed significant coherence in almost no conditions. The class-wise range measure even tended to show that subclusters were less coherent w.r.t. class than random groups of neurons. However, the visualization score measure of coherence was reliably significant as shown in Figure 3, and the effect measures were reliably above 1. Together, these results offer evidence that subclusters tended to perform coherent sub-tasks, but not in a class-specific way.
All partitioning methods give similar results. In Figure 3, we find that activation-based clusterings have a weak tendency to produce lower Fisher-Bates p values in our analysis compared to weightbased ones. Meanwhile, between local and global clustering methods, local methods seem to have a weak tendency to produce lower Fisher-Bates p values. However, neither tendency was consistent, and all clustering methods performed similarly overall. This is somewhat unexpected: one might have predicted that weight-based methods’ lack of runtime information or local methods’ lack of global information would lead to lower quality clusterings, but this was not the case.

heading: 5 DISCUSSION

text:
Contributions: In this work, we introduce several methods for partitioning networks into clusters of neurons and analyze the resulting partitions for modularity. Key to this is analyzing proxies: importance as a means of understanding what parts of a network are crucial for performance, and coherence as a measure for how specialized these parts are. We rigorously evaluate these proxies using statistical methods, finding that even the weights-only clustering methods are able to reveal clusters with a significant degree of importance and coherence compared to random ones. In each network, we found evidence that our partitioning methods were able to identify modular subsets of neurons via measuring accuracy drops under lesions (importance) and feature visualization scores (coherence). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first method which is able to quantitatively assess modularity exhibited by neural networks in a way that does not require a human in the loop.
Relation to other research: Having effective tools for interpreting networks has been a key goal, especially when this aids in the diagnosis of failure modes (e.g., Carter et al. (2019); Mu & Andreas (2020)). Our work relates to this goal, though indirectly. The tests we perform are based on data from lesions and feature visualizations, both of which are interpretability tools. But rather than directly using these data to interpret subclusters, our focus is one step higher: on automatedly testing whether these subclusters are worth analyzing at all, and finding ways to screen for ones that should be the subject of deeper investigation. By showing that the partitioning methods we use identify subclusters that exhibit modularity, these results suggest that clustering neurons offers a useful level of abstraction through which to study networks.
Limitations: One limitation of our work is a lack of assurance that importance and coherence are reliably strong proxies for human-comprehensible forms of modularity. While they are sufficient to imply some degree of abstractability with respect to the task at hand, they may not always be particularly useful for a prosaic understanding. Relatedly, our approach is also not designed to identify the subtask performed by a set of units which exhibit modularity, nor does it identify relationships between modules. Given these limitations, the tools we introduce should be seen as methods for screening a network in search for evidence of modularity overall and for particular sets of units which seem to exhibit it and merit additional investigation. A final notable limitation is that these methods do not offer tools for building more modular networks beyond techniques for measuring it. Future work toward this may benefit from our techniques but should also hinge on architectural or regularization-based methods for promoting modularity in networks.
Conclusion: While we make progress here toward better understanding how networks can be understood, neural systems are still complex, and more insights are needed to develop prosaic understandings of them. The ultimate goal would be to develop reliable methods for building models which are both dynamic and lend themselves to faithful semantic interpretation. We believe that using modularity as an organizing principle and expanding our interpretability toolbox with more modular models and better-tuned partitioning methods will lead to a richer understanding of networks and better tools for building them to be reliable and verifiable.

heading: A APPENDIX

heading: A.1 SPECTRAL CLUSTERING ALGORITHM

text:
The spectral clustering algorithm on the graph G = (V,E) produces a partition of its vertices in which there are stronger connections within sets of vertices than between them (Shi & Malik, 2000). It does so by solving a relaxation of the NP-Hard problem of minimizing the n-cut (normalized cut) for a partition. For disjoint, non-empty sets X1, ...Xk where ∪ki=1Xi = V , this is defined by von Luxburg (2007) as:
n-cut(X1, ..., Xk) := 1
2 k∑ i=1 W (Xi, Xi) vol(Xi)
for two sets of vertices X,Y ⊆ V , we define W (X,Y ) := ∑ vi∈X,vj∈Y wij ; the degree of a vertex
vi ∈ V is di = ∑n j=1 wij ; and the volume of a subset X ⊆ V is vol(X) := ∑ i∈X di.
We use the scikit-learn implementation (Pedregosa et al., 2011) with the ARPACK eigenvalue solver (Borzı̀ & Borzı̀, 2006).
Algorithm 1: Normalized spectral clustering according to Shi & Malik (2000), implemented in scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al., 2011), description taken from von Luxburg (2007). Input :Weighted adjacency matrix W ∈ Rn×n, number k of clusters to construct
1 Compute the unnormalized Laplacian L. 2 Compute the first k generalized eigenvectors u1, ..., uk of the generalized eigenproblem Lu = λDu. 3 Let U ∈ Rn×k be the matrix containing the vectors u1, ..., uk as columns. 4 For i = 1, .., n, let yi ∈ Rk be the vector corresponding to the ith row of U . 5 Cluster the points (yi)i=1,...,n in Rk with the k-means algorithm into clusters C1, ..., Ck,
Output :Clusters A1, ..., Ak with Ai = {j|yj ∈ Ci}.

heading: A.2 NETWORK TRAINING DETAILS

text:
We use Tensorflow’s implementation of the Keras API (Abadi et al., 2015; Chollet et al., 2015). When training all networks, we use the Adam algorithm (Kingma & Ba, 2014) with the standard Keras hyperparameters: learning rate 0.001, β1 = 0.9, β2 = 0.999, no amsgrad. The loss function was categorical cross-entropy. For all non-ImageNet networks, we train 5 identically-configured replicates.
Small MLPs (MNIST): We train MLPs with 4 hidden layers, each of width 256, for 20 epochs with batch size 128. All MLPs achieved a test accuracy on MNIST between 97.6% and 98.2%. On Fashion-MNIST, they achieved test accuracies between 88.4% and 89.4%.
Small CNNs (MNIST): These networks had 3 convolutional layers with 64 3 × 3 channels each with the second and third hidden layers being followed by max pooling with a 2 by 2 window. There was a final fully-connected hidden layer with 128 neurons. We train them with a batch size of 64 for 10 epochs. All small CNNs achieved a testing accuracy MNIST between 99.1% and 99.4%. On Fashion-MNIST, they achieved test accuracies between 91.8% and 92.4%.
Mid-sized VGG CNNs (CIFAR-10): We implement a version of VGG-16 described by Simonyan & Zisserman (2014); Liu & Deng (2015). We train these with Adam, for 200 epochs with a batch size of 128. These are trained using L2 regularization with a coefficient of 5 × 10−4 and dropout with a rate tuned per-layer as done in Simonyan & Zisserman (2014); Liu & Deng (2015). Training was done with data augmentation which consisted of random rotations between 0 and 15 degrees, random shifts both vertically and horizontally of up to 10% of the side length, and random horizontal flipping. The unregularized networks achieved testing accuracies between 90.3% and 90.9% while the regularized ones did between 82.8% and 86.6%.
Large CNNs (ImageNet): We experimented with VGG-16 and 19 (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2014) and ResNet-18, and 50 (He et al., 2016) networks. Weights were obtained from the Python image-classifiers package, version 1.0.0.

heading: A.3 PIPELINE - SECOND PART

heading: A.4 CORRELATION-BASED VISUALIZATION

text:
Halves-MNIST Dataset: Figure 6 shows examples from our halves-MNIST dataset. To create each example, two images were randomly selected, resized to have half their original width, and concatenated together. Each image was labeled with the sum of the two digits modulo 10. Examples are shown in Figure 1.
Visualization: To create the images from Figure 1 which show clusters of neurons in the first layer of an MLP trained on halves-MNIST, we use a correlation-based visualization algorithm from Watanabe (2019). We construct visualizations of neurons using their correlations with the input pixels’ pre ReLU activities across the test dataset. Instead of Pearson (linear) correlation, we use the Spearman correlation (which is the Pearson correlation of ranks) because it is able to capture relationships which tend to monotonically increase even if they are nonlinear.
After obtaining visualizations for each neuron in a subcluster, we do not directly take their average to visualize the entire subcluster. To see why, consider two neurons which are highly anticorrelated across the testing set. These neurons are highly coherent, but averaging together their visualizations would obscure this by cancellation. To fix this problem, we align the signs of the visualizations for individual neurons using a variant of a stoahcstic alignment algorithm from Watanabe (2019). To visualize a subcluster, for a number of iterations (we use 20), we iterate over its neurons and calculate
for each the sum of cosines between its visualization and each of the other neurons’ visualizations in vector form. If this sum is negative, we flip the sign of this neuron’s visualization. After this procedure, we take the mean of the visualizations within a subcluster. This process is detailed in Algorithm 2.
Algorithm 2: Sign Alignment Algorithm (Similar to Watanabe (2019)) Result: Set of sign-aligned neuron visualizations. Input Neuron visualizations V1:n for iter in num iters do
for vi in V do Calculate sum of cosines, c = ∑ j 6=i vi·vj√ vi·vi √ vj ·vj
if c < 0 then vi ← −vi
end end
end
Comparison to Random Subclusters: To confirm that the visualization in Figure 1 show that our clustering algorithms are capturing modularity in the first layer of the MLPs, we compare them to the same visualizations but for random subclusters in Figure 6. The visualizations that were used to produce Figure 1 are each at the top of a column of one of the panels in Figure 6 and are above visualizations for random subclusters of the same size and layer. Each column in each panel was independently scaled to have values in the interval [0,1]. In each of the four panels, visualizations in the first row reflect the most selectivity to one side or the other meaning that compared to random subclusters, the ones found via these clustering methods tend to be significantly more coherent.
MLPs can Compute Modular Sums: A network an do this for M values by using an intermediate layer of M2 neurons, each of which serve as a detector of one of the possible combinations of inputs. Consider a ReLU MLP with 2M inputs, a single hidden layer with M2 neurons, and then M outputs. Suppose that it is given the task of mapping datapoints in which the input nodes numbered i and M + j are activated with value 1 to an output in which the mod (i+ j,M)th node is active with value 1. It could do so if each hidden neuron with a ReLU activation detected one of the M2 possible input combinations via a bias of -1 and two weights of 1 connecting it to each of the input nodes in the combination is detects. A single weight from each hidden neuron to its corresponding output point would allow the network to compute the modular sum. In our MLPs, we have M = 10 classes, and the MLPs have a dense layer with > 102 neurons preceding the output layer. Thus, they are capable of computing a modular sum in the halves and stack-diff tasks we give to them.

heading: A.5 FEATURE VISUALIZATION

text: All visualizations were created using the Lucid10 package. The optimization objective for visualizing sub-clusters was the L1 norm of the pre-ReLU inputs for all neurons inside the subcluster (it was an L1 norm of L1 norms for convolutional feature maps). For small MLPs, small CNNs, and mid-sized CNNs, we generated images using random jittering and scaling, and for ImageNet models, we used Lucid’s default transformations which consist of padding, jittering, rotation, and scaling with default hyperparameters. For all networks, we used the standard pixel-based parameterization of the image and no regularization on the Adam optimizer for 100 steps. For visualizations in small MLPs and CNNs, we used versions of these networks trained on 3-channel versions of their datasets in which the same inputs were stacked thrice because Lucid requires networks to have 3-channel inputs. However, we show grayscaled versions of these in figure 7. Refer to Section 4 of the main paper for quantitative analysis of the optimization objective values.

heading: A.6 ROBUSTNESS TO THE CHOICE OF CLUSTER NUMBER

text:
In the main paper, we only present results form experiments in which the number of clusters, k, was set to 16. The fact that we find evidence of modularity in networks from the MNIST to ImageNet scale using k = 16 suggests that detecting it is robust to k. However, here we also present a direct
10https://github.com/tensorflow/lucid
comparison between results for CIFAR CNN-VGGs for k ∈ {8, 12, 16}. Tables 2 and 3 show these results for lesion and feature-visualization experiments respectively. In general, whether or not an experiment resulted in a significant Fisher-Bates p value or an effect measure suggesting modularity is consistent across these values of k.

heading: A.7 MULTIPLE TESTING CORRECTIONS

text: In the main paper in Tables 4 and 5, we report various Fisher-Bates p values that summarize the degree to which statistics of sub-clusters vary from those of random groups of neurons within a network. For each network, the Fisher-Bates p values one-sidedly test whether the true sub-cluster measures reflect more importance/coherence than those of random subclusters. However, when testing multiple networks, one may want to reduce the chance of false positives due to the sheer number of tests performed. To incorporate this analysis into our results, we perform a multiple testing correction within Tables 4 and 5 (separately) using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995). This procedure controls the false discovery rate: that is, the expected proportion of rejections of the null hypothesis that are false positives, where the expectation is taken under the data-generating distribution. It relies on all experiments being independent. For a false discovery rate α and m ordered p values {p1...pm}, this procedure chooses a critical p value as pk where k = arg maxj∈1:m I(pj ≤ jα m ) where I is an indicator. All p values greater than pk are deemed not significant at this level. In Figure 3 we demarcate p values significant at the α = 0.05 level under this correction. In our case, the critical value was pk = 0.025.

heading: A.8 FULL TABULAR DATA

text: Tables 4 (lesion experiments data) and 5 (feature visualization experiment data) show the p value results from Figure 3 and effect measure results from Table 1 but do so in a form that places the Fisher-Bates p value and effect measure data from each network in the same row. All FisherBates p values significant according to the Benjamini Hochberg method are in bold, and all effect measures indicating greater average importance/coherence among true subclusters compared to random subclusters are in bold.