NeuroViz: Real-time Interactive Visualization of Forward and Backward Passes in Neural Network Training

TL;DR

NeuroViz is an interactive tool that visualizes neural network training in real-time, helping users understand activations, weight updates, and loss progression through dynamic visualizations.

Contribution

This paper introduces NeuroViz, a novel real-time visualization system for neural network training that enhances interpretability and user understanding.

Findings

Achieved highest usability score (SUS 80.97) among compared tools.

Over 70% of users reported increased transparency in training.

Participants ranked NeuroViz highly for clarity and usefulness.

Abstract

Training neural networks is difficult to interpret, particularly for newcomers. We introduce NeuroViz, an interactive visualization tool that supports real-time exploration of fully connected neural network training. Users can configure network architecture, activation functions, learning rates, and datasets, then observe activations, weight updates, and loss progression. NeuroViz visualizes weight changes in direct correspondence with activation signals in both forward and backward passes, enabling users to distinguish pre- and post-update states within individual epochs and view dynamically updating per-neuron equations. We conduct a comparative user study with 31 participants against six established visualization tools and we achieved the highest usability score (SUS 80.97, in the 'excellent' range), with mean rankings of 2.47 for clarity and 2.23 for usefulness (lower is better). Over 70% of participants reported that the visualizations substantially increased their perception of neural network training transparency. The implemented instance is accessible at https://neuroviz.org.