Towards the characterization of representations learned via capsule-based network architectures

Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNets) have been re-introduced as amore compact and interpretable alternative to standard deep neural networks. While recent efforts have proved their compression capabilities, to date, their interpretability properties have not been fully assessed. Here, we conduct a systematic and principled study towards assessing the interpretability of these types of networks. We pay special attention towards analyzing the level to which part-whole relationships are encoded within the learned representation. Our analysis in the MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10, and CelebA datasets on several capsule-based architectures suggest that the representations encoded in CapsNets might not be as disentangled nor strictly related to parts-whole relationships as is commonly stated in the literature.