Hierarchical Feature-level Reverse Propagation for Post-Training Neural Networks
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 8, 2025
Abstract
End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a dominant paradigm, yet its
highly entangled black-box models pose significant challenges in terms of
interpretability and safety assurance. To improve model transparency and
training flexibility, this paper proposes a hierarchical and decoupled
post-training framework tailored for pretrained neural networks. By
reconstructing intermediate feature maps from ground-truth labels, surrogate
supervisory signals are introduced at transitional layers to enable independent
training of specific components, thereby avoiding the complexity and coupling
of conventional end-to-end backpropagation and providing interpretable insights
into networks' internal mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first method to formalize feature-level reverse computation as well-posed
optimization problems, which we rigorously reformulate as systems of linear
equations or least squares problems. This establishes a novel and efficient
training paradigm that extends gradient backpropagation to feature
backpropagation. Extensive experiments on multiple standard image
classification benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves
superior generalization performance and computational efficiency compared to
traditional training approaches, validating its effectiveness and potential.