ConceptEvo: Interpreting Concept Evolution in Deep Learning Training

We present ConceptEvo, a unified interpretation framework for deep neural networks (DNNs) that reveals the inception and evolution of learned concepts during training. Our work fills a critical gap in DNN interpretation research, as existing methods focus on post-hoc interpretation after training. ConceptEvo presents two novel technical contributions: (1) an algorithm that generates a unified semantic space that enables side-by-side comparison of different models during training; and (2) an algorithm that discovers and quantifies important concept evolutions for class predictions. Through a large-scale human evaluation with 260 participants and quantitative experiments, we show that ConceptEvo discovers evolutions across different models that are meaningful to humans and important for predictions. ConceptEvo works for both modern (ConvNeXt) and classic DNNs (e.g., VGGs, InceptionV3).