We investigated the feature map inside deep neural networks (DNNs) by tracking the transport map. We are interested in the role of depth (why do DNNs perform better than shallow models?) and the interpretation of DNNs (what do intermediate layers do?) Despite the rapid development in their application, DNNs remain analytically unexplained because the hidden layers are nested and the parameters are not faithful. Inspired by the integral representation of shallow NNs, which is the continuum limit of the width, or the hidden unit number, we developed the flow representation and transport analysis of DNNs. The flow representation is the continuum limit of the depth or the hidden layer number, and it is specified by an ordinary differential equation with a vector field. We interpret an ordinary DNN as a transport map or a Euler broken line approximation of the flow. Technically speaking, a dynamical system is a natural model for the nested feature maps. In addition, it opens a new way to the coordinate-free treatment of DNNs by avoiding the redundant parametrization of DNNs. Following Wasserstein geometry, we analyze a flow in three aspects: dynamical system, continuity equation, and Wasserstein gradient flow. A key finding is that we specified a series of transport maps of the denoising autoencoder (DAE). Starting from the shallow DAE, this paper develops three topics: the transport map of the deep DAE, the equivalence between the stacked DAE and the composition of DAEs, and the development of the double continuum limit or the integral representation of the flow representation. As partial answers to the research questions, we found that deeper DAEs converge faster and the extracted features are better; in addition, a deep Gaussian DAE transports mass to decrease the Shannon entropy of the data distribution.
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