Empirical Evidence for Simply Connected Decision Regions in Image Classifiers

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

This paper empirically investigates whether image classifier decision regions are simply connected by verifying if loops between images with the same label can be filled by label-preserving surfaces.

Understanding the topology of decision regions is central to explaining the inner workings of deep neural networks. Prior empirical work has provided evidence that these regions are path connected. We study a stronger topological question: whether closed loops inside a decision region can be contracted without leaving that region. To this end, we propose an iterative quad-mesh filling procedure that constructs a finite-resolution label-preserving surface bounded by a given loop and lying entirely within the same decision region. We further connect this construction to natural Coons patches in order to quantify its deviation from a canonical geometric interpolation of the loop. By evaluating our method across several modern image-classification models, we provide empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that decision regions in deep neural networks are not only path connected, but also simply connected.
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Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.06380 We empirically investigate whether image-classifier decision regions appear simply connected at finite resolution.

Prior work has studied path-connectedness of decision regions. This paper asks a stronger topological question: given four natural images with the same predicted label, can the loop they form be filled by a label-preserving surface?

Our procedure recursively constructs and verifies a quad-mesh surface using grid sampling and local decision-boundary repair. Across several ImageNet classifiers, the experiments provide empirical evidence consistent with the hypothesis that decision regions are simply connected.

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