Diffusion Explainer: Visual Explanation for Text-to-image Stable Diffusion

Diffusion-based generative models' impressive ability to create convincing images has captured global attention. However, their complex internal structures and operations often make them difficult for non-experts to understand. We present Diffusion Explainer, the first interactive visualization tool that explains how Stable Diffusion transforms text prompts into images. Diffusion Explainer tightly integrates a visual overview of Stable Diffusion's complex components with detailed explanations of their underlying operations, enabling users to fluidly transition between multiple levels of abstraction through animations and interactive elements. By comparing the evolutions of image representations guided by two related text prompts over refinement timesteps, users can discover the impact of prompts on image generation. Diffusion Explainer runs locally in users' web browsers without the need for installation or specialized hardware, broadening the public's education access to modern AI techniques. Our open-sourced tool is available at: https://poloclub.github.io/diffusion-explainer/. A video demo is available at https://youtu.be/Zg4gxdIWDds.

NeuroMapper: In-browser Visualizer for Neural Network Training

We present our ongoing work NeuroMapper, an in-browser visualization tool that helps machine learning (ML) developers interpret the evolution of a model during training, providing a new way to monitor the training process and visually discover reasons for suboptimal training. While most existing deep neural networks (DNNs) interpretation tools are designed for already-trained model, NeuroMapper scalably visualizes the evolution of the embeddings of a model's blocks across training epochs, enabling real-time visualization of 40,000 embedded points. To promote the embedding visualizations' spatial coherence across epochs, NeuroMapper adapts AlignedUMAP, a recent nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique to align the embeddings. With NeuroMapper, users can explore the training dynamics of a Resnet-50 model, and adjust the embedding visualizations' parameters in real time. NeuroMapper is open-sourced at https://github.com/poloclub/NeuroMapper and runs in all modern web browsers. A demo of the tool in action is available at: https://poloclub.github.io/NeuroMapper/.

ConceptEvo: Interpreting Concept Evolution in Deep Learning Training

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used for decision making, prompting a surge of interest in interpreting how these complex models work. Recent literature on DNN interpretation has revolved around already-trained models; however, much less research focuses on interpreting how the models evolve as they are trained. Interpreting model evolution is crucial to monitor network training and can aid proactive decisions about necessary interventions. In this work, we present ConceptEvo, a general interpretation framework for DNNs that reveals the inception and evolution of detected concepts during training. Through a large-scale human evaluation with 260 participants and quantitative experiments, we show that ConceptEvo discovers evolution across different models that are meaningful to humans, helpful for early-training intervention decisions, and crucial to the prediction for a given class.