But why is the method called fine_tune, and not fit? fastai actually does have a method called fit, which does indeed fit a model (i.e. look at images in the training set multiple times, each time updating the parameters to make the predictions closer and closer to the target labels). But in this case, we've started with a pretrained model, and we don't want to throw away all those capabilities that it already has. As you'll learn in this book, there are some important tricks to adapt a pretrained model for a new dataset—a process called fine-tuning. jargon: Fine-tuning: A transfer learning technique where the parameters of a pretrained model are updated by training for additional epochs using a different task to that used for pretraining. When you use the fine_tune method, fastai will use these tricks for you. There are a few parameters you can set (which we'll discuss later), but in the default form shown here, it does two steps: Use one epoch to fit just those parts of the model necessary to get the new random head to work correctly with your dataset. Use the number of epochs requested when calling the method to fit the entire model, updating the weights of the later layers (especially the head) faster than the earlier layers (which, as we'll see, generally don't require many changes from the pretrained weights). The head of a model is the part that is newly added to be specific to the new dataset. An epoch is one complete pass through the dataset. After calling fit, the results after each epoch are printed, showing the epoch number, the training and validation set losses (the "measure of performance" used for training the model), and any metrics you've requested (error rate, in this case). So, with all this code our model learned to recognize cats and dogs just from labeled examples. But how did it do it? What Our Image Recognizer Learned At this stage we have an image recognizer that is working very well, but we have no idea what it is actually doing! Although many people complain that deep learning results in impenetrable "black box" models (that is, something that gives predictions but that no one can understand), this really couldn't be further from the truth. There is a vast body of research showing how to deeply inspect deep learning models, and get rich insights from them. Having said that, all kinds of machine learning models (including deep learning, and traditional statistical models) can be challenging to fully understand, especially when considering how they will behave when coming across data that is very different to the data used to train them. We'll be discussing this issue throughout this book. In 2013 a PhD student, Matt Zeiler, and his supervisor, Rob Fergus, published the paper "Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks", which showed how to visualize the neural network weights learned in each layer of a model. They carefully analyzed the model that won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and used this analysis to greatly improve the model, such that they were able to go on to win the 2013 competition! <<img_layer1>> is the picture that they published of the first layer's weights.