Toward Reliable and Explainable Nail Disease Classification: Leveraging Adversarial Training and Grad-CAM Visualization
East West University（东西大学）
Farzia Hossain, Samanta Ghosh, Shahida Begum, B. M. Shahria Alam, Mohammad Tahmid Noor, Md Parvez Mia, Nishat Tasnim Niloy
备注：
6 pages, 12 figures. This is the author's accepted manuscript of a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 16th International IEEE Conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT 2025). The final published version will be available via IEEE Xplore
Human nail diseases are gradually observed over all age groups, especially among older individuals, often going ignored until they become severe. Early detection and accurate diagnosis of such conditions are important because they sometimes reveal our body's health problems. But it is challenging due to the inferred visual differences between disease types. This paper presents a machine learning-based model for automated classification of nail diseases based on a publicly available dataset, which contains 3,835 images scaling six categories. In 224x224 pixels, all images were resized to ensure consistency. To evaluate performance, four well-known CNN models-InceptionV3, DenseNet201, EfficientNetV2, and ResNet50 were trained and analyzed. Among these, InceptionV3 outperformed the others with an accuracy of 95.57%, while DenseNet201 came next with 94.79%. To make the model stronger and less likely to make mistakes on tricky or noisy images, we used adversarial training. To help understand how the model makes decisions, we used SHAP to highlight important features in the predictions. This system could be a helpful support for doctors, making nail disease diagnosis more accurate and faster.
The Grad-CAM algorithm provides a way to identify what parts of an image contribute most to the output of a classifier deep network. The algorithm is simple and widely used for localization of objects in an image, although some researchers have point out its limitations, and proposed various alternatives. One of them is Grad-CAM++, that according to its authors can provide better visual explanations for network predictions, and does a better job at locating objects even for occurrences of multiple object instances in a single image. Here we show that Grad-CAM++ is practically equivalent to a v…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We propose a technique for producing "visual explanations" for decisions from a large class of CNN-based models, making them more transparent. Our approach - Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses the gradients of any target concept, flowing into the final convolutional layer to produce a coarse localization map highlighting important regions in the image for predicting the concept. Grad-CAM is applicable to a wide variety of CNN model-families: (1) CNNs with fully-connected layers, (2) CNNs used for structured outputs, (3) CNNs used in tasks with multimodal inputs or rein…
To have a better understanding and usage of Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs), the visualization and interpretation of CNNs has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In particular, several Class Activation Mapping (CAM) methods have been proposed to discover the connection between CNN's decision and image regions. In spite of the reasonable visualization, lack of clear and sufficient theoretical support is the main limitation of these methods. In this paper, we introduce two axioms -- Conservation and Sensitivity -- to the visualization paradigm of the CAM methods. Meanwhile, a dedi…
The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a widely used deep learning architecture for computer vision. However, its black box nature makes it difficult to interpret the behavior of the model. To mitigate this issue, AI practitioners have explored explainable AI methods like Class Activation Map (CAM) and Grad-CAM. Although these methods have shown promise, they are limited by architectural constraints or the burden of gradient computing. To overcome this issue, Score-CAM and Ablation-CAM have been proposed as gradient-free methods, but they have longer execution times compared to CAM or Grad-…
We consider a light-weight method which allows to improve the explainability of localized classification networks. The method considers (Grad)CAM maps during the training process by modification of the training loss and does not require additional structural elements. It is demonstrated that the (Grad)CAM interpretability, as measured by several indicators, can be improved in this way. Since the method shall be applicable on embedded systems and on standard deeper architectures, it essentially takes advantage of second order derivatives during the training and does not require additional model…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；University of Montenegro（黑山大学）
Despite the tremendous success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision, the mechanism of CNNs still lacks clear interpretation. Currently, class activation mapping (CAM), a famous visualization technique to interpret CNN's decision, has drawn increasing attention. Gradient-based CAMs are efficient while the performance is heavily affected by gradient vanishing and exploding. In contrast, gradient-free CAMs can avoid computing gradients to produce more understandable results. However, existing gradient-free CAMs are quite time-consuming because hundreds of forward interferenc…
St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences（圣珀尔滕应用科学大学）；EYYES GmbH（EYYES有限公司）
We investigate the problem of explainability for visual object detectors. Specifically, we demonstrate on the example of the YOLO object detector how to integrate Grad-CAM into the model architecture and analyze the results. We show how to compute attribution-based explanations for individual detections and find that the normalization of the results has a great impact on their interpretation.
Explanation methods facilitate the development of models that learn meaningful concepts and avoid exploiting spurious correlations. We illustrate a previously unrecognized limitation of the popular neural network explanation method Grad-CAM: as a side effect of the gradient averaging step, Grad-CAM sometimes highlights locations the model did not actually use. To solve this problem, we propose HiResCAM, a novel class-specific explanation method that is guaranteed to highlight only the locations the model used to make each prediction. We prove that HiResCAM is a generalization of CAM and explor…
The gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) method can faithfully highlight important regions in images for deep model prediction in image classification, image captioning and many other tasks. It uses the gradients in back-propagation as weights (grad-weights) to explain network decisions. However, applying Grad-CAM to embedding networks raises significant challenges because embedding networks are trained by millions of dynamically paired examples (e.g. triplets). To overcome these challenges, we propose an adaptation of the Grad-CAM method for embedding networks. First, we aggr…
We propose a technique for making Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models more transparent by visualizing input regions that are 'important' for predictions -- or visual explanations. Our approach, called Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses class-specific gradient information to localize important regions. These localizations are combined with existing pixel-space visualizations to create a novel high-resolution and class-discriminative visualization called Guided Grad-CAM. These methods help better understand CNN-based models, including image captioning and vis…
Technical university of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt（法兰克福大学医院）
M3d-CAM is an easy to use library for generating attention maps of CNN-based PyTorch models improving the interpretability of model predictions for humans. The attention maps can be generated with multiple methods like Guided Backpropagation, Grad-CAM, Guided Grad-CAM and Grad-CAM++. These attention maps visualize the regions in the input data that influenced the model prediction the most at a certain layer. Furthermore, M3d-CAM supports 2D and 3D data for the task of classification as well as for segmentation. A key feature is also that in most cases only a single line of code is required for…
Gaining insight into how deep convolutional neural network models perform image classification and how to explain their outputs have been a concern to computer vision researchers and decision makers. These deep models are often referred to as black box due to low comprehension of their internal workings. As an effort to developing explainable deep learning models, several methods have been proposed such as finding gradients of class output with respect to input image (sensitivity maps), class activation map (CAM), and Gradient based Class Activation Maps (Grad-CAM). These methods under perform…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Visualizing the features captured by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is one of the conventional approaches to interpret the predictions made by these models in numerous image recognition applications. Grad-CAM is a popular solution that provides such a visualization by combining the activation maps obtained from the model. However, the average gradient-based terms deployed in this method underestimates the contribution of the representations discovered by the model to its predictions. Addressing this problem, we introduce a solution to tackle this issue by computing the path integral of t…
In this paper, we run two methods of explanation, namely LIME and Grad-CAM, on a convolutional neural network trained to label images with the LEGO bricks that are visible in them. We evaluate them on two criteria, the improvement of the network's core performance and the trust they are able to generate for users of the system. We find that in general, Grad-CAM seems to outperform LIME on this specific task: it yields more detailed insight from the point of view of core performance and 80\% of respondents asked to choose between them when it comes to the trust they inspire in the model choose …
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Seoul National University Hospital（首尔国立大学医院）
A meningioma is a type of brain tumor that requires tumor volume size follow ups in order to reach appropriate clinical decisions. A fully automated tool for meningioma detection is necessary for reliable and consistent tumor surveillance. There have been various studies concerning automated lesion detection. Studies on the application of convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods, which have achieved a state-of-the-art level of performance in various computer vision tasks, have been carried out. However, the applicable diseases are limited, owing to a lack of strongly annotated data bei…
Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad- CAM), is an example-based explanation method that provides a gradient activation heat map as an explanation for Convolution Neural Network (CNN) models. The drawback of this method is that it cannot be used to generalize CNN behaviour. In this paper, we present a novel method that extends Grad-CAM from example-based explanations to a method for explaining global model behaviour. This is achieved by introducing two new metrics, (i) Mean Observed Dissimilarity (MOD) and (ii) Variation in Dissimilarity (VID), for model generalization. These metric…
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（浦项科技大学）
Consistency training, which exploits both supervised and unsupervised learning with different augmentations on image, is an effective method of utilizing unlabeled data in semi-supervised learning (SSL) manner. Here, we present another version of the method with Grad-CAM consistency loss, so it can be utilized in training model with better generalization and adjustability. We show that our method improved the baseline ResNet model with at most 1.44 % and 0.31 $\pm$ 0.59 %p accuracy improvement on average with CIFAR-10 dataset. We conducted ablation study comparing to using only psuedo-label fo…
Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) is becoming an important research field, due to its wide applications and the rapid development of computer vision technologies. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in the FGVC usually employ attention mechanisms to first capture the semantic parts and then discover their subtle differences between distinct classes. The channel-spatial attention mechanisms, which focus on the discriminative channels and regions simultaneously, have significantly improved the classification performance. However, the existing attention modules are poorly guided s…
We present Smooth Grad-CAM++, a technique which combines two recent techniques: SMOOTHGRAD and Grad-CAM++. Smooth Grad-CAM++ has the capability of either visualizing a layer, subset of feature maps, or subset of neurons within a feature map at each instance. We experimented with few images, and we discovered that Smooth Grad-CAM++ produced more visually sharp maps with larger number of salient pixels highlighted in the given input images when compared with other methods. Smooth Grad-CAM++ will give insight into what our deep CNN models (including models trained on medical scan or imagery) lear…
Neural networks are becoming increasingly better at tasks that involve classifying and recognizing images. At the same time techniques intended to explain the network output have been proposed. One such technique is the Gradient-based Class Activation Map (Grad-CAM), which is able to locate features of an input image at various levels of a convolutional neural network (CNN), but is sensitive to the vanishing gradients problem. There are techniques such as Integrated Gradients (IG), that are not affected by that problem, but its use is limited to the input layer of a network. Here we introduce …
Neural networks trained to classify images do so by identifying features that allow them to distinguish between classes. These sets of features are either causal or context dependent. Grad-CAM is a popular method of visualizing both sets of features. In this paper, we formalize this feature divide and provide a methodology to extract causal features from Grad-CAM. We do so by defining context features as those features that allow contrast between predicted class and any contrast class. We then apply a set theoretic approach to separate causal from contrast features for COVID-19 CT scans. We sh…
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；Cisco Systems（思科系统公司）
Over the last decade, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have been highly successful in solving complex vision problems. However, these deep models are perceived as "black box" methods considering the lack of understanding of their internal functioning. There has been a significant recent interest in developing explainable deep learning models, and this paper is an effort in this direction. Building on a recently proposed method called Grad-CAM, we propose a generalized method called Grad-CAM++ that can provide better visual explanations of CNN model predictions, in terms of better obje…
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典RISE研究所）；Lund University（隆德大学）
Machine Learning (ML) is a fundamental part of modern perception systems. In the last decade, the performance of computer vision using trained deep neural networks has outperformed previous approaches based on careful feature engineering. However, the opaqueness of large ML models is a substantial impediment for critical applications such as in the automotive context. As a remedy, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) has been proposed to provide visual explanations of model internals. In this paper, we demonstrate how Grad-CAM heatmaps can be used to increase the explainabilit…
This document summarizes different visual explanations methods such as CAM, Grad-CAM, Localization using Multiple Instance Learning - Saliency-based methods, Saliency-driven Class-Impressions, Muting pixels in input image - Adversarial methods and Activation visualization, Convolution filter visualization - Feature-based methods. We have also shown the results produced by different methods and a comparison between CAM, GradCAM, and Guided Backpropagation.
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics（马克斯·普朗克分子细胞生物学与遗传学研究所）；Center for Systems Biology Dresden（德累斯顿系统生物学中心）
Convolutional neural networks have become state-of-the-art in a wide range of image recognition tasks. The interpretation of their predictions, however, is an active area of research. Whereas various interpretation methods have been suggested for image classification, the interpretation of image segmentation still remains largely unexplored. To that end, we propose SEG-GRAD-CAM, a gradient-based method for interpreting semantic segmentation. Our method is an extension of the widely-used Grad-CAM method, applied locally to produce heatmaps showing the relevance of individual pixels for semantic…
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…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
A number of studies on lung nodule classification lack clinical/biological interpretations of the features extracted by convolutional neural network (CNN). The methods like class activation mapping (CAM) and gradient-based CAM (Grad-CAM) are tailored for interpreting localization and classification tasks while they ignored fine-grained features. Therefore, CAM and Grad-CAM cannot provide optimal interpretation for lung nodule categorization task in low-dose CT images, in that fine-grained pathological clues like discrete and irregular shape and margins of nodules are capable of enhancing sensi…
