Paper detail

Deleting object selective units in a fully-connected layer of deep convolutional networks improves classification performance

Neurons in the primate visual cortices show a wide range of stimulus selectivity. Some neurons respond to only a small fraction of stimulus images, whereas others respond to many stimulus images in a non-selective manner. It is unclear how stimulus selective and non-selective neurons contribute to visual object recognition. Herein, we examined the relationship between stimulus selectivity and the effect of deletion of units on task performance using fully a connected layer of two types of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Deleting a stimulus selective unit caused slight improvements of task performance, whereas deleting stimulus non-selective units caused a significant decrease in task performance. However, these findings do not imply that stimulus selective units have no use for the task. Indeed, better performance was obtained when the networks consisted of both stimulus selective and non-selective units.