  Several recent works have empirically observed that Convolutional Neural Nets
(CNNs) are (approximately) invertible. To understand this approximate
invertibility phenomenon and how to leverage it more effectively, we focus on a
theoretical explanation and develop a mathematical model of sparse signal
recovery that is consistent with CNNs with random weights. We give an exact
connection to a particular model of model-based compressive sensing (and its
recovery algorithms) and random-weight CNNs. We show empirically that several
learned networks are consistent with our mathematical analysis and then
demonstrate that with such a simple theoretical framework, we can obtain
reasonable re- construction results on real images. We also discuss gaps
between our model assumptions and the CNN trained for classification in
practical scenarios.
