In plain words: To show which image parts a classifier relies on, it hides patches and watches how the prediction changes. Earlier saliency tricks were guesswork tied to one kind of network; this one works on any classifier and its answers can be checked.
Abstract · Interpretable Explanations of Black Boxes by Meaningful Perturbation
As machine learning algorithms are increasingly applied to high impact yet high risk tasks, such as medical diagnosis or autonomous driving, it is critical that researchers can explain how such algorithms arrived at their predictions. In recent years, a number of image saliency methods have been developed to summarize where highly complex neural networks "look" in an image for evidence for their predictions. However, these techniques are limited by their heuristic nature and architectural constraints. In this paper, we make two main contributions: First, we propose a general framework for learning different kinds of explanations for any black box algorithm. Second, we specialise the framework to find the part of an image most responsible for a classifier decision. Unlike previous works, our method is model-agnostic and testable because it is grounded in explicit and interpretable image perturbations.
Ruth Fong, Andrea Vedaldi
arXiv:1704.03296 · cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Apr 11, 2017 · updated Dec 3, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Final camera-ready paper published at ICCV 2017 (Supplementary materials: http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_ICCV_2017/supplemental/Fong_Interpretable_Explanations_of_ICCV_2017_supplemental.pdf)