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ADVISE: ADaptive feature relevance and VISual Explanations for convolutional neural networks

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Abstract

To equip convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with explainability, it is essential to interpret how opaque models make specific decisions, understand what causes the errors, improve the architecture design, and identify unethical biases in the classifiers. This paper introduces ADVISE, a new explainability method that quantifies and leverages the relevance of each unit of the feature map to provide better visual explanations. To this end, we propose using adaptive bandwidth kernel density estimation to assign a relevance score to each unit of the feature map with respect to the predicted class. We also propose an evaluation protocol to quantitatively assess the visual explainability of CNN models. Our extensive evaluation of ADVISE in image classification tasks using pretrained AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet50, and Xception models on ImageNet shows that our method outperforms other visual explainable methods in quantifying feature-relevance and visual explainability while maintaining competitive time complexity. Our experiments further show that ADVISE fulfils the sensitivity and implementation independence axioms while passing the sanity checks. The implementation is accessible for reproducibility purposes on https://github.com/dehshibi/ADVISE.

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Data Availability

All images and data belong to the ImageNet database, which is publicly available on https://www.image-net.org/.

Notes

  1. The terms feature map and activation map are used interchangeably here since the former refers to a mapping of where a specific type of feature can be found in an image, and the latter is a mapping that relates to the activation of different areas of the image.

  2. \(\frac{\omega ^{*}}{\gamma } = n\) is used in our experiment.

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Funding

This work is partially supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, with grant agreement No. 101002711, and by PID2022-138721NB-I00 grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation (FEDER funds).

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Author notes

  1. Mona Ashtari-Majlan and Gereziher Adhane have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Av. de la Universidad, 30, 28911, Leganes, Madrid, Spain

    Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi

  2. Unconventional Computing Laboratory, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, BS16 1QY, UK

    Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi

  3. Department of Computer Science, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Rambla del Poblenou, 156, 08018, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

    Mona Ashtari-Majlan, Gereziher Adhane & David Masip

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  1. Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi
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Correspondence to Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi.

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Dehshibi, M.M., Ashtari-Majlan, M., Adhane, G. et al. ADVISE: ADaptive feature relevance and VISual Explanations for convolutional neural networks. Vis Comput 40, 5407–5419 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-023-03112-5

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