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Distill

distill.pubadded August 2026

Weight Banding

Distill8 Apr 2021

Open up any ImageNet conv net and look at the weights in the last layer. You’ll find a uniform spatial pattern to them, dramatically unlike anything we see elsewhere in the network.

Branch Specialization

Distill5 Apr 2021

If we think of interpretability as a kind of “anatomy of neural networks,” most of the circuits thread has involved studying tiny little veins – looking at the small-scale, at individual neurons...

Self-Organising Textures

Distill11 Feb 2021

Neural Cellular Automata Model of Pattern Formation Neural Cellular Automata (NCA In this work, we apply NCA to the task of texture synthesis.

Visualizing Weights

Distill4 Feb 2021

The problem of understanding a neural network is a little bit like reverse engineering a large compiled binary of a computer program.

Curve Circuits

Distill30 Jan 2021

We reverse engineer a non-trivial learned algorithm from the weights of a neural network and use its core ideas to craft an artificial artificial neural network from scratch that reimplements it.

Self-classifying MNIST Digits

Distill27 Aug 2020

Achieving Distributed Coordination with Neural Cellular Automata Growing Neural Cellular Automata Our question is closely related to another unsolved problem in developmental and regenerative...

Curve Detectors

Distill17 Jun 2020

Every vision model we’ve explored in detail contains neurons which detect curves. Curve detectors in vision models have been hinted at in the literature as far back as 2013 (see figures in Zeiler &...