A Game-Theoretic Taxonomy of Visual Concepts in DNNs

In this paper, we rethink how a DNN encodes visual concepts of different complexities from a new perspective, i.e. the game-theoretic multi-order interactions between pixels in an image. Beyond the categorical taxonomy of objects and the cognitive taxonomy of textures and shapes, we provide a new taxonomy of visual concepts, which helps us interpret the encoding of shapes and textures, in terms of concept complexities. In this way, based on multi-order interactions, we find three distinctive signal-processing behaviors of DNNs encoding textures. Besides, we also discover the flexibility for a DNN to encode shapes is lower than the flexibility of encoding textures. Furthermore, we analyze how DNNs encode outlier samples, and explore the impacts of network architectures on interactions. Additionally, we clarify the crucial role of the multi-order interactions in real-world applications. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.