Feature Space Analysis by Guided Diffusion Model (2509.07936v1)

Abstract: One of the key issues in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is the black-box nature of their internal feature extraction process. Targeting vision-related domains, this paper focuses on analysing the feature space of a DNN by proposing a decoder that can generate images whose features are guaranteed to closely match a user-specified feature. Owing to this guarantee that is missed in past studies, our decoder allows us to evidence which of various attributes in an image are encoded into a feature by the DNN, by generating images whose features are in proximity to that feature. Our decoder is implemented as a guided diffusion model that guides the reverse image generation of a pre-trained diffusion model to minimise the Euclidean distance between the feature of a clean image estimated at each step and the user-specified feature. One practical advantage of our decoder is that it can analyse feature spaces of different DNNs with no additional training and run on a single COTS GPU. The experimental results targeting CLIP's image encoder, ResNet-50 and vision transformer demonstrate that images generated by our decoder have features remarkably similar to the user-specified ones and reveal valuable insights into these DNNs' feature spaces.