Is this true? my understanding is the hard part about interpreting neural networks is that there are many many neurons, with many many interconnections, not that the activation function itself is not explainable. even with an explainable classifier, how do you explain trillions of them with deep layers of nested connections
So I do think that's more interpretable in two ways:
1. You can look at specific representations in the model and "see" what they "mean"
2. This means you can give a high-level interpretation to a particular inference run: "X_i is a 7 because it's like this prototype that looks like a 7, and it has some features that only turn up in 7s"
I do think complex models doing complex tasks will sometimes have extremely complex "explanations" which may not really communicate anything to a human, and so do not function as an explanation.
Neutral networks need to be over parameterized to find good solutions, meaning there is a surface of solutions. The optimization procedure tries to walk towards that surface as quickly as possible, and tend to find a low-energy point on the surface of solutions. In particular, a low energy solution isn't sparse, and therefore isn't interpretable.