Gradient-Adjusted Neuron Activation Profiles for Comprehensive Introspection of Convolutional Speech Recognition Models

Abstract: Deep Learning based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models are very successful, but hard to interpret. To gain better understanding of how Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) accomplish their tasks, introspection methods have been proposed. Adapting such techniques from computer vision to speech recognition is not straight-forward, because speech data is more complex and less interpretable than image data. In this work, we introduce Gradient-adjusted Neuron Activation Profiles (GradNAPs) as means to interpret features and representations in Deep Neural Networks. GradNAPs are characteristic responses of ANNs to particular groups of inputs, which incorporate the relevance of neurons for prediction. We show how to utilize GradNAPs to gain insight about how data is processed in ANNs. This includes different ways of visualizing features and clustering of GradNAPs to compare embeddings of different groups of inputs in any layer of a given network. We demonstrate our proposed techniques using a fully-convolutional ASR model.