Saliency methods are widely used to visualize which input features are deemed relevant to a model's prediction. However, their visual plausibility can obscure critical limitations. In this work, we propose a diagnostic test for class sensitivity: a method's ability to distinguish between competing class labels on the same input. Through extensive experiments, we show that many widely used saliency methods produce nearly identical explanations regardless of the class label, calling into question their reliability. We find that class-insensitive behavior persists across architectures and datasets, suggesting the failure mode is structural rather than model-specific. Motivated by these findings, we introduce CASE, a contrastive explanation method that isolates features uniquely discriminative for the predicted class. We evaluate CASE using the proposed diagnostic and a perturbation-based fidelity test, and show that it produces faithful and more class-specific explanations than existing methods.
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Contrastive learning has led to substantial improvements in the quality of learned embedding representations for tasks such as image classification. However, a key drawback of existing contrastive augmentation methods is that they may lead to the modification of the image content which can yield undesired alterations of its semantics. This can affect the performance of the model on downstream tasks. Hence, in this paper, we ask whether we can augment image data in contrastive learning such that the task-relevant semantic content of an image is preserved. For this purpose, we propose to leverag…
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Texas State University（德克萨斯州立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Neural network binarization accelerates deep models by quantizing their weights and activations into 1-bit. However, there is still a huge performance gap between Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) and their full-precision (FP) counterparts. As the quantization error caused by weights binarization has been reduced in earlier works, the activations binarization becomes the major obstacle for further improvement of the accuracy. BNN characterises a unique and interesting structure, where the binary and latent FP activations exist in the same forward pass (i.e., $\text{Binarize}(\mathbf{a}_F) = \mathb…
The goal of a classification model is to assign the correct labels to data. In most cases, this data is not fully described by the given set of labels. Often a rich set of meaningful concepts exist in the domain that can much more precisely describe each datapoint. Such concepts can also be highly useful for interpreting the model's classifications. In this paper we propose a model, denoted as Variational Autoencoder-based Contrastive Explanation (VAE-CE), that represents data with high-level concepts and uses this representation for both classification and generating explanations. The explana…
Visual explanations are logical arguments based on visual features that justify the predictions made by neural networks. Current modes of visual explanations answer questions of the form $`Why \text{ } P?'$. These $Why$ questions operate under broad contexts thereby providing answers that are irrelevant in some cases. We propose to constrain these $Why$ questions based on some context $Q$ so that our explanations answer contrastive questions of the form $`Why \text{ } P, \text{} rather \text{ } than \text{ } Q?'$. In this paper, we formalize the structure of contrastive visual explanations for…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Training a supervised neural network classifier typically requires many annotated training samples. Collecting and annotating a large number of data points are costly and sometimes even infeasible. Traditional annotation process uses a low-bandwidth human-machine communication interface: classification labels, each of which only provides several bits of information. We propose Active Learning with Contrastive Explanations (ALICE), an expert-in-the-loop training framework that utilizes contrastive natural language explanations to improve data efficiency in learning. ALICE learns to first use ac…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
In this paper we propose a novel method that provides contrastive explanations justifying the classification of an input by a black box classifier such as a deep neural network. Given an input we find what should be %necessarily and minimally and sufficiently present (viz. important object pixels in an image) to justify its classification and analogously what should be minimally and necessarily \emph{absent} (viz. certain background pixels). We argue that such explanations are natural for humans and are used commonly in domains such as health care and criminology. What is minimally but critica…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Wenzhou-Kean University（温州肯恩大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Robotics of Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
While class activation map (CAM) generated by image classification network has been widely used for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) and semantic segmentation (WSSS), such classifiers usually focus on discriminative object regions. In this paper, we propose Contrastive learning for Class-agnostic Activation Map (C$^2$AM) generation only using unlabeled image data, without the involvement of image-level supervision. The core idea comes from the observation that i) semantic information of foreground objects usually differs from their backgrounds; ii) foreground objects with similar a…
Increasing demands for understanding the internal behavior of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have led to remarkable improvements in explanation methods. Particularly, several class activation mapping (CAM) based methods, which generate visual explanation maps by a linear combination of activation maps from CNNs, have been proposed. However, the majority of the methods lack a clear theoretical basis on how they assign the coefficients of the linear combination. In this paper, we revisit the intrinsic linearity of CAM with respect to the activation maps; we construct an explanation model o…
Convolutional neural network (CNN) models for computer vision are powerful but lack explainability in their most basic form. This deficiency remains a key challenge when applying CNNs in important domains. Recent work on explanations through feature importance of approximate linear models has moved from input-level features (pixels or segments) to features from mid-layer feature maps in the form of concept activation vectors (CAVs). CAVs contain concept-level information and could be learned via clustering. In this work, we rethink the ACE algorithm of Ghorbani et~al., proposing an alternative…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）；Northrop Grumman（诺斯罗普·格鲁曼公司）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Post-hoc explanation methods, e.g., Grad-CAM, enable humans to inspect the spatial regions responsible for a particular network decision. However, it is shown that such explanations are not always consistent with human priors, such as consistency across image transformations. Given an interpretation algorithm, e.g., Grad-CAM, we introduce a novel training method to train the model to produce more consistent explanations. Since obtaining the ground truth for a desired model interpretation is not a well-defined task, we adopt ideas from contrastive self-supervised learning, and apply them to the…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Visual localization is a crucial component in the application of mobile robot and autonomous driving. Image retrieval is an efficient and effective technique in image-based localization methods. Due to the drastic variability of environmental conditions, e.g. illumination, seasonal and weather changes, retrieval-based visual localization is severely affected and becomes a challenging problem. In this work, a general architecture is first formulated probabilistically to extract domain invariant feature through multi-domain image translation. And then a novel gradient-weighted similarity activat…
City Data Science Institute - City, University of London（伦敦城市大学城市数据科学研究所）
A novel explainable AI method called CLEAR Image is introduced in this paper. CLEAR Image is based on the view that a satisfactory explanation should be contrastive, counterfactual and measurable. CLEAR Image explains an image's classification probability by contrasting the image with a corresponding image generated automatically via adversarial learning. This enables both salient segmentation and perturbations that faithfully determine each segment's importance. CLEAR Image was successfully applied to a medical imaging case study where it outperformed methods such as Grad-CAM and LIME by an a…
Yachiyo Engineering, Co.,Ltd. Research Institute for Infrastructure Paradigm Shift（八千代工程株式会社基础设施范式转换研究所）
For infrastructure inspections, damage representation does not constantly match the predefined classes of damage grade, resulting in detailed clusters of unseen damages or more complex clusters from overlapped space between two grades. The damage representation has fundamentally complex features; consequently, not all the damage classes can be perfectly predefined. The proposed MN-pair contrastive learning method helps to explore an embedding damage representation beyond the predefined classes by including more detailed clusters. It maximizes both the similarity of M-1 positive images close to…
Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；The University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）
A number of backpropagation-based approaches such as DeConvNets, vanilla Gradient Visualization and Guided Backpropagation have been proposed to better understand individual decisions of deep convolutional neural networks. The saliency maps produced by them are proven to be non-discriminative. Recently, the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) approach was proposed to explain the classification decisions of rectifier neural networks. In this work, we evaluate the discriminativeness of the generated explanations and analyze the theoretical foundation of LRP, i.e. Deep Taylor Decomposition. Th…
Contrastive Pretraining for Visual Concept Explanations of Socioeconomic Outcomes
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；Getulio Vargas Foundation（热图利奥·瓦加斯基金会）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）
Signature Activation: A Sparse Signal View for Holistic Saliency
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard（麻省理工学院与哈佛大学博德研究所）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Okayama University（冈山大学）；Japan Science and Technology Agency（日本科学技术振兴机构）；Rikkyo University（立教大学）；National Institute for Physiological Sciences（生理学研究所）；Araya Inc.（Araya 公司）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) can accurately decode task-related information from brain activations. However, because of the nonlinearity of the DNN, the decisions made by DNNs are hardly interpretable. One of the promising approaches for explaining such a black-box system is counterfactual explanation. In this framework, the behavior of a black-box system is explained by comparing real data and realistic synthetic data that are specifically generated such that the black-box system outputs an unreal outcome. Here we introduce a novel generative DNN (counterfactual activation generator, CAG) that…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
Understanding and explaining deep learning models is an imperative task. Towards this, we propose a method that obtains gradient-based certainty estimates that also provide visual attention maps. Particularly, we solve for visual question answering task. We incorporate modern probabilistic deep learning methods that we further improve by using the gradients for these estimates. These have two-fold benefits: a) improvement in obtaining the certainty estimates that correlate better with misclassified samples and b) improved attention maps that provide state-of-the-art results in terms of correla…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Despite their high accuracies, modern complex image classifiers cannot be trusted for sensitive tasks due to their unknown decision-making process and potential biases. Counterfactual explanations are very effective in providing transparency for these black-box algorithms. Nevertheless, generating counterfactuals that can have a consistent impact on classifier outputs and yet expose interpretable feature changes is a very challenging task. We introduce a novel method to generate causal and yet interpretable counterfactual explanations for image classifiers using pretrained generative models wi…
Recently, increasing attention has been drawn to the internal mechanisms of convolutional neural networks, and the reason why the network makes specific decisions. In this paper, we develop a novel post-hoc visual explanation method called Score-CAM based on class activation mapping. Unlike previous class activation mapping based approaches, Score-CAM gets rid of the dependence on gradients by obtaining the weight of each activation map through its forward passing score on target class, the final result is obtained by a linear combination of weights and activation maps. We demonstrate that Sco…
A main issue preventing the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in end user applications is the low level of transparency in the decision process. Previous work on CNN interpretability has mostly focused either on localizing the regions of the image that contribute to the result or on building an external model that generates plausible explanations. However, the former does not provide any semantic information and the latter does not guarantee the faithfulness of the explanation. We propose an intermediate representation composed of multiple Semantically Interpretable Activation Maps (S…
InverTune: Removing Backdoors from Multimodal Contrastive Learning Models via Trigger Inversion and Activation Tuning
1 School of Cyber Science；Engineering, Wuhan University 0.3em 2 School of Computer Science, Wuhan University 0.3em 3 Institute for Math \& AI, Wuhan University
This paper evaluates whether training a decision tree based on concepts extracted from a concept-based explainer can increase interpretability for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) models and boost the fidelity and performance of the used explainer. CNNs for computer vision have shown exceptional performance in critical industries. However, it is a significant barrier when deploying CNNs due to their complexity and lack of interpretability. Recent studies to explain computer vision models have shifted from extracting low-level features (pixel-based explanations) to mid-or high-level feature…
Center for Research in Computer Vision, University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学计算机视觉研究中心）
This work explores the visual explanation for deep metric learning and its applications. As an important problem for learning representation, metric learning has attracted much attention recently, while the interpretation of such model is not as well studied as classification. To this end, we propose an intuitive idea to show where contributes the most to the overall similarity of two input images by decomposing the final activation. Instead of only providing the overall activation map of each image, we propose to generate point-to-point activation intensity between two images so that the rela…
Reliable or Deceptive? Investigating Gated Features for Smooth Visual Explanations in CNNs
Indian Institute of Information Technology Kalyani（印度卡利亚尼信息技术学院）；Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College（贾尔派古里政府工程学院）；Alipurduar Government Engineering and Management College（阿里布尔杜阿尔政府工程与管理学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（鲁基印度理工学院）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is increasingly used to analyze the behavior of neural networks. Concept activation uses human-interpretable concepts to explain neural network behavior. This study aimed at assessing the feasibility of regression concept activation to explain detection and classification of multi-modal volumetric data. Proof-of-concept was demonstrated in metastatic prostate cancer patients imaged with positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT). Multi-modal volumetric concept activation was used to provide global and local explanations. Sensitivity was …
VisTA: Vision-Text Alignment Model with Contrastive Learning using Multimodal Data for Evidence-Driven, Reliable, and Explainable Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis
Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV)（洛桑大学医院中心（CHUV））；Université de Lausanne (UNIL)（洛桑大学（UNIL））；VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University（越南国家大学下属越南工程技术大学）；University of Science, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学下属科学大学）；Military Hospital 175（175军事医院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, International University, Vietnam National University（越南国家大学下属国际大学生物医学工程学院）
