Papers › Dead Pixel Test Using Effective Receptive Field

Dead Pixel Test Using Effective Receptive Field

31 Aug 2021arXiv:2108.13576archive 2025-07-28

Bum Jun Kim, Hyeyeon Choi, Hyeonah Jang, Dong Gu Lee, Wonseok Jeong, Sang Woo Kim

Deep neural networks have been used in various fields, but their internal behavior is not well known. In this study, we discuss two counterintuitive behaviors of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). First, we evaluated the size of the receptive field. Previous studies have attempted to increase or control the size of the receptive field. However, we observed that the size of the receptive field does not describe the classification accuracy. The size of the receptive field would be inappropriate for representing superiority in performance because it reflects only depth or kernel size and does not reflect other factors such as width or cardinality. Second, using the effective receptive field, we examined the pixels contributing to the output. Intuitively, each pixel is expected to equally contribute to the final output. However, we found that there exist pixels in a partially dead state with little contribution to the output. We reveal that the reason for this lies in the architecture of CNN and discuss solutions to reduce the phenomenon. Interestingly, for general classification tasks, the existence of dead pixels improves the training of CNNs. However, in a task that captures small perturbation, dead pixels degrade the performance. Therefore, the existence of these dead pixels should be understood and considered in practical applications of CNN.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Fine-Grained Image Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Fine-Grained Image Classification Caltech-101 ResNeXt-101-32x8d Accuracy 95.58 #5 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Fine-Grained Image Classification Caltech-101 ResNeXt-101-32x8d Top-1 Error Rate 4.42% #5 of 18 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Convolution

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections