JOURNAL ARTICLE

Towards Global Explanations of Convolutional Neural Networks With Concept Attribution

Abstract

With the growing prevalence of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), there is an urgent demand to explain their behaviors. Global explanations contribute to understanding model predictions on a whole category of samples, and thus have attracted increasing interest recently. However, existing methods overwhelmingly conduct separate input attribution or rely on local approximations of models, making them fail to offer faithful global explanations of CNNs. To overcome such drawbacks, we propose a novel two-stage framework, Attacking for Interpretability (AfI), which explains model decisions in terms of the importance of user-defined concepts. AfI first conducts a feature occlusion analysis, which resembles a process of attacking models to derive the category-wide importance of different features. We then map the feature importance to concept importance through ad-hoc semantic tasks. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of AfI and its superiority in providing more accurate estimations of concept importance than existing proposals.

Keywords:
Interpretability Convolutional neural network Computer science Attribution Feature (linguistics) Artificial intelligence Process (computing) Machine learning Psychology

Metrics

42
Cited By
4.11
FWCI (Field Weighted Citation Impact)
91
Refs
0.94
Citation Normalized Percentile
Is in top 1%
Is in top 10%

Citation History

Topics

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Physical Sciences →  Computer Science →  Artificial Intelligence
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Physical Sciences →  Computer Science →  Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning in Healthcare
Physical Sciences →  Computer Science →  Artificial Intelligence
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