Interpretable representation learning for visual intelligence

Recent progress of deep neural networks in computer vision and machine learning has enabled transformative applications across robotics, healthcare, and security. However, despite the superior performance of the deep neural networks, it remains challenging to understand their inner workings and explain their output predictions. This thesis investigates several novel approaches for opening up the "black box" of neural networks used in visual recognition tasks and understanding their inner working mechanism. I first show that objects and other meaningful concepts emerge as a consequence of recognizing scenes. A network dissection approach is further introduced to automatically identify the internal units as the emergent concept detectors and quantify their interpretability. Then I describe an approach that can efficiently explain the output prediction for any given image. It sheds light on the decision-making process of the networks and why the predictions succeed or fail. Finally, I show some ongoing efforts toward learning efficient and interpretable deep representations for video event understanding and some future directions.