By their nature, the composition of black box models is opaque. This makes the ability to generate explanations for the response to stimuli challenging. The importance of explaining black box models has become increasingly important given the prevalence of AI and ML systems and the need to build legal and regulatory frameworks around them. Such explanations can also increase trust in these uncertain systems. In our paper we present RICE, a method for generating explanations of the behaviour of black box models by (1) probing a model to extract model output examples using sensitivity analysis; (2) applying CNPInduce, a method for inductive logic program synthesis, to generate logic programs based on critical input-output pairs; and (3) interpreting the target program as a human-readable explanation. We demonstrate the application of our method by generating explanations of an artificial neural network trained to follow simple traffic rules in a hypothetical self-driving car simulation. We conclude with a discussion on the scalability and usability of our approach and its potential applications to explanation-critical scenarios.
Interpretable models already exist. Of note, there are a number of classification models that are readily interpretable, for example decision trees, rule-based systems, and nearest-neighbour methods, each with varying levels of usability @cite_23 . Decision trees generate a tree-like structure representing a series of tests on different features in a training dataset where leaf nodes represent various labeled classifications. Rules-based systems explicitly map an input to an action through some explicitly defined series of logical assertions ( rules). Nearest-neighbour algorithms qualify a classification based on the values of attributes in the immediate neighbourhood of some input.
@cite_23
2578395343 2026905436 2148217011 1930624869 2120240539 1967148170 2112993448 2103705607 2622028207 2953280703 2220384803 2080430334 2152923755 2113242816 2336829997 2059424674 1489348810 2949467366 2332488709 2072801280
We present a novel approach to enrich classification trees with the representation learning ability of deep (neural) networks within an end-to-end trainable architecture. We combine these two worlds via a stochastic and differentiable decision tree model, which steers the formation of latent representations within the hidden layers of a deep network. The proposed model differs from conventional deep networks in that a decision forest provides the final predictions and it differs from conventional decision forests by introducing a principled, joint and global optimization of split and leaf node parameters. Our approach compares favourably to other state-of-the-art deep models on a large-scale image classification task like ImageNet. The vast majority of the literature evaluates the performance of classification models using only the criterion of predictive accuracy. This paper reviews the case for considering also the comprehensibility (interpretability) of classification models, and discusses the interpretability of five types of classification models, namely decision trees, classification rules, decision tables, nearest neighbors and Bayesian network classifiers. We discuss both interpretability issues which are specific to each of those model types and more generic interpretability issues, namely the drawbacks of using model size as the only criterion to evaluate the comprehensibility of a model, and the use of monotonicity constraints to improve the comprehensibility and acceptance of classification models by users. Automatic classification of everyday activities can be used for promotion of health-enhancing physical activities and a healthier lifestyle. In this paper, methods used for classification of everyday activities like walking, running, and cycling are described. The aim of the study was to find out how to recognize activities, which sensors are useful and what kind of signal processing and classification is required. A large and realistic data library of sensor data was collected. Sixteen test persons took part in the data collection, resulting in approximately 31 h of annotated, 35-channel data recorded in an everyday environment. The test persons carried a set of wearable sensors while performing several activities during the 2-h measurement session. Classification results of three classifiers are shown: custom decision tree, automatically generated decision tree, and artificial neural network. The classification accuracies using leave-one-subject-out cross validation range from 58 to 97 for custom decision tree classifier, from 56 to 97 for automatically generated decision tree, and from 22 to 96 for artificial neural network. Total classification accuracy is 82 for custom decision tree classifier, 86 for automatically generated decision tree, and 82 for artificial neural network Decision trees are attractive classifiers due to their high execution speed. But trees derived with traditional methods often cannot be grown to arbitrary complexity for possible loss of generalization accuracy on unseen data. The limitation on complexity usually means suboptimal accuracy on training data. Following the principles of stochastic modeling, we propose a method to construct tree-based classifiers whose capacity can be arbitrarily expanded for increases in accuracy for both training and unseen data. The essence of the method is to build multiple trees in randomly selected subspaces of the feature space. Trees in, different subspaces generalize their classification in complementary ways, and their combined classification can be monotonically improved. The validity of the method is demonstrated through experiments on the recognition of handwritten digits. We explore a new approach to shape recognition based on a virtually infinite family of binary features (queries) of the image data, designed to accommodate prior information about shape invariance and regularity. Each query corresponds to a spatial arrangement of several local topographic codes (or tags), which are in themselves too primitive and common to be informative about shape. All the discriminating power derives from relative angles and distances among the tags. The important attributes of the queries are a natural partial ordering corresponding to increasing structure and complexity; semi-invariance, meaning that most shapes of a given class will answer the same way to two queries that are successive in the ordering; and stability, since the queries are not based on distinguished points and substructures. No classifier based on the full feature set can be evaluated, and it is impossible to determine a priori which arrangements are informative. Our approach is to select informative features and build tree classifiers at the same time by inductive learning. In effect, each tree provides an approximation to the full posterior where the features chosen depend on the branch that is traversed. Due to the number and nature of the queries, standard decision tree construction based on a fixed-length feature vector is not feasible. Instead we entertain only a small random sample of queries at each node, constrain their complexity to increase with tree depth, and grow multiple trees. The terminal nodes are labeled by estimates of the corresponding posterior distribution over shape classes. An image is classified by sending it down every tree and aggregating the resulting distributions. The method is applied to classifying handwritten digits and synthetic linear and nonlinear deformations of three hundred L AT E X symbols. Stateof-the-art error rates are achieved on the National Institute of Standards and Technology database of digits. The principal goal of the experiments on L AT E X symbols is to analyze invariance, generalization error and related issues, and a comparison with artificial neural networks methods is presented in this context. Decision trees are probably the most popular and commonly used classification model. They are recursively built following a top-down approach (from general concepts to particular examples) by repeated splits of the training dataset. When this dataset contains numerical attributes, binary splits are usually performed by choosing the threshold value which minimizes the impurity measure used as splitting criterion (e.g. C4.5 gain ratio criterion or CART Gini's index). In this paper we propose the use of multi-way splits for continuous attributes in order to reduce the tree complexity without decreasing classification accuracy. This can be done by intertwining a hierarchical clustering algorithm with the usual greedy decision tree learning. Many methods have been proposed to solve the image classification problem for a large number of categories. Among them, methods based on tree-based representations achieve good trade-off between accuracy and test time efficiency. While focusing on learning a tree-shaped hierarchy and the corresponding set of classifiers, most of them [11, 2, 14] use a greedy prediction algorithm for test time efficiency. We argue that the dramatic decrease in accuracy at high efficiency is caused by the specific design choice of the learning and greedy prediction algorithms. In this work, we propose a classifier which achieves a better trade-off between efficiency and accuracy with a given tree-shaped hierarchy. First, we convert the classification problem as finding the best path in the hierarchy, and a novel branch-and-bound-like algorithm is introduced to efficiently search for the best path. Second, we jointly train the classifiers using a novel Structured SVM (SSVM) formulation with additional bound constraints. As a result, our method achieves a significant 4.65 , 5.43 , and 4.07 (relative 24.82 , 41.64 , and 109.79 ) improvement in accuracy at high efficiency compared to state-of-the-art greedy "tree-based" methods [14] on Caltech-256 [15], SUN [32] and Image Net 1K [9] dataset, respectively. Finally, we show that our branch-and-bound-like algorithm naturally ranks the paths in the hierarchy (Fig. 8) so that users can further process them. In order to optimize the accuracy of the nearest-neighbor classification rule, a weighted distance is proposed, along with algorithms to automatically learn the corresponding weights. These weights may be specific for each class and feature, for each individual prototype, or for both. The learning algorithms are derived by (approximately) minimizing the leaving-one-out classification error of the given training set. The proposed approach is assessed through a series of experiments with UCI STATLOG corpora, as well as with a more specific task of text classification which entails very sparse data representation and huge dimensionality. In all these experiments, the proposed approach shows a uniformly good behavior, with results comparable to or better than state-of-the-art results published with the same data so far We propose a novel method called deep convolutional decision jungle (CDJ) and its learning algorithm for image classification. The CDJ maintains the structure of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs), i.e. multiple layers of multiple response maps fully connected. Each response map-or node-in both the convolutional and fully-connected layers selectively respond to class labels s.t. each data sample travels via a specific soft route of those activated nodes. The proposed method CDJ automatically learns features, whereas decision forests and jungles require pre-defined feature sets. Compared to CNNs, the method embeds the benefits of using data-dependent discriminative functions, which better handles multi-modal heterogeneous data; further,the method offers more diverse sparse network responses, which in turn can be used for cost-effective learning classification. The network is learnt by combining conventional softmax and proposed entropy losses in each layer. The entropy loss,as used in decision tree growing, measures the purity of data activation according to the class label distribution. The back-propagation rule for the proposed loss function is derived from stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization of CNNs. We show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public image classification benchmarks and one face verification dataset. We also demonstrate the use of auxiliary data labels, when available, which helps our method to learn more discriminative routing and representations and leads to improved classification. We present a tree-structured network architecture for large scale image classification. The trunk of the network contains convolutional layers optimized over all classes. At a given depth, the trunk splits into separate branches, each dedicated to discriminate a different subset of classes. Each branch acts as an expert classifying a set of categories that are difficult to tell apart, while the trunk provides common knowledge to all experts in the form of shared features. The training of our "network of experts" is completely end-to-end: the partition of categories into disjoint subsets is learned simultaneously with the parameters of the network trunk and the experts are trained jointly by minimizing a single learning objective over all classes. The proposed structure can be built from any existing convolutional neural network (CNN). We demonstrate its generality by adapting 4 popular CNNs for image categorization into the form of networks of experts. Our experiments on CIFAR100 and ImageNet show that in every case our method yields a substantial improvement in accuracy over the base CNN, and gives the best result achieved so far on CIFAR100. Finally, the improvement in accuracy comes at little additional cost: compared to the base network, the training time is only moderately increased and the number of parameters is comparable or in some cases even lower. We present Deep Neural Decision Forests - a novel approach that unifies classification trees with the representation learning functionality known from deep convolutional networks, by training them in an end-to-end manner. To combine these two worlds, we introduce a stochastic and differentiable decision tree model, which steers the representation learning usually conducted in the initial layers of a (deep) convolutional network. Our model differs from conventional deep networks because a decision forest provides the final predictions and it differs from conventional decision forests since we propose a principled, joint and global optimization of split and leaf node parameters. We show experimental results on benchmark machine learning datasets like MNIST and ImageNet and find on-par or superior results when compared to state-of-the-art deep models. Most remarkably, we obtain Top5-Errors of only 7.84 6.38 on ImageNet validation data when integrating our forests in a single-crop, single seven model GoogLeNet architecture, respectively. Thus, even without any form of training data set augmentation we are improving on the 6.67 error obtained by the best GoogLeNet architecture (7 models, 144 crops). Graphical models (e.g., Bayesian and constraint networks, influence diagrams, and Markov decision processes) have become a central paradigm for knowledge representation and reasoning in both artificial intelligence and computer science in general. These models are used to perform many reasoning tasks, such as scheduling, planning and learning, diagnosis and prediction, design, hardware and software verification, and bioinformatics. These problems can be stated as the formal tasks of constraint satisfaction and satisfiability, combinatorial optimization, and probabilistic inference. It is well known that the tasks are computationally hard, but research during the past three decades has yielded a variety of principles and techniques that significantly advanced the state of the art. In this book we provide comprehensive coverage of the primary exact algorithms for reasoning with such models. The main feature exploited by the algorithms is the model's graph. We present inference-based, message-passing schemes (e.g., variable-elimination) and search-based, conditioning schemes (e.g., cycle-cutset conditioning and AND OR search). Each class possesses distinguished characteristics and in particular has different time vs. space behavior. We emphasize the dependence of both schemes on few graph parameters such as the treewidth, cycle-cutset, and (the pseudo-tree) height. We believe the principles outlined here would serve well in moving forward to approximation and anytime-based schemes. The target audience of this book is researchers and students in the artificial intelligence and machine learning area, and beyond. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction What are Graphical Models Inference: Bucket Elimination for Deterministic Networks Inference: Bucket Elimination for Probabilistic Networks Tree-Clustering Schemes AND OR Search Spaces and Algorithms for Graphical Models Combining Search and Inference: Trading Space for Time Conclusion Bibliography Author's Biography Current work in object categorization discriminates among objects that typically possess gross differences which are readily apparent. However, many applications require making much finer distinctions. We address an insect categorization problem that is so challenging that even trained human experts cannot readily categorize images of insects considered in this paper. The state of the art that uses visual dictionaries, when applied to this problem, yields mediocre results (16.1 error). Three possible explanations for this are (a) the dictionaries are unsupervised, (b) the dictionaries lose the detailed information contained in each keypoint, and (c) these methods rely on hand-engineered decisions about dictionary size. This paper presents a novel, dictionary-free methodology. A random forest of trees is first trained to predict the class of an image based on individual keypoint descriptors. A unique aspect of these trees is that they do not make decisions but instead merely record evidence-i.e., the number of descriptors from training examples of each category that reached each leaf of the tree. We provide a mathematical model showing that voting evidence is better than voting decisions. To categorize a new image, descriptors for all detected keypoints are “dropped” through the trees, and the evidence at each leaf is summed to obtain an overall evidence vector. This is then sent to a second-level classifier to make the categorization decision. We achieve excellent performance (6.4 error) on the 9-class STONEFLY9 data set. Also, our method achieves an average AUC of 0.921 on the PASCAL06 VOC, which places it fifth out of 21 methods reported in the literature and demonstrates that the method also works well for generic object categorization. Much of previous attention on decision trees focuses on the splitting criteria and optimization of tree sizes. The dilemma between overfitting and achieving maximum accuracy is seldom resolved. A method to construct a decision tree based classifier is proposed that maintains highest accuracy on training data and improves on generalization accuracy as it grows in complexity. The classifier consists of multiple trees constructed systematically by pseudorandomly selecting subsets of components of the feature vector, that is, trees constructed in randomly chosen subspaces. The subspace method is compared to single-tree classifiers and other forest construction methods by experiments on publicly available datasets, where the method's superiority is demonstrated. We also discuss independence between trees in a forest and relate that to the combined classification accuracy. We present a tree-structured network architecture for large-scale image classification. The trunk of the network contains convolutional layers optimized over all classes. At a given depth, the trunk splits into separate branches, each dedicated to discriminate a different subset of classes. Each branch acts as an expert classifying a set of categories that are difficult to tell apart, while the trunk provides common knowledge to all experts in the form of shared features. The training of our “network of experts” is completely end-to-end: the partition of categories into disjoint subsets is learned simultaneously with the parameters of the network trunk and the experts are trained jointly by minimizing a single learning objective over all classes. The proposed structure can be built from any existing convolutional neural network (CNN). We demonstrate its generality by adapting 4 popular CNNs for image categorization into the form of networks of experts. Our experiments on CIFAR100 and ImageNet show that in every case our method yields a substantial improvement in accuracy over the base CNN, and gives the best result achieved so far on CIFAR100. Finally, the improvement in accuracy comes at little additional cost: compared to the base network, the training time is only moderately increased and the number of parameters is comparable or in some cases even lower. In this work we present Neural Decision Forests, a novel approach to jointly tackle data representation- and discriminative learning within randomized decision trees. Recent advances of deep learning architectures demonstrate the power of embedding representation learning within the classifier--An idea that is intuitively supported by the hierarchical nature of the decision forest model where the input space is typically left unchanged during training and testing. We bridge this gap by introducing randomized Multi- Layer Perceptrons (rMLP) as new split nodes which are capable of learning non-linear, data-specific representations and taking advantage of them by finding optimal predictions for the emerging child nodes. To prevent overfitting, we i) randomly select the image data fed to the input layer, ii) automatically adapt the rMLP topology to meet the complexity of the data arriving at the node and iii) introduce an l1-norm based regularization that additionally sparsifies the network. The key findings in our experiments on three different semantic image labelling datasets are consistently improved results and significantly compressed trees compared to conventional classification trees. This paper describes a supervised algorithm for word sensedisambiguation based on hierarchies of decision lists. This algorithmsupports a useful degree of conditional branching while minimizing thetraining data fragmentation typical of decision trees. Classificationsare based on a rich set of collocational, morphological and syntacticcontextual features, extracted automatically from training data andweighted sensitive to the nature of the feature and feature class. Thealgorithm is evaluated comprehensively in the SENSEVAL framework,achieving the top performance of all participating supervised systems onthe 36 test words where training data is available. Clearly explaining a rationale for a classification decision to an end-user can be as important as the decision itself. Existing approaches for deep visual recognition are generally opaque and do not output any justification text; contemporary vision-language models can describe image content but fail to take into account class-discriminative image aspects which justify visual predictions. We propose a new model that focuses on the discriminating properties of the visible object, jointly predicts a class label, and explains why the predicted label is appropriate for the image. We propose a novel loss function based on sampling and reinforcement learning that learns to generate sentences that realize a global sentence property, such as class specificity. Our results on a fine-grained bird species classification dataset show that our model is able to generate explanations which are not only consistent with an image but also more discriminative than descriptions produced by existing captioning methods. Clearly explaining a rationale for a classification decision to an end user can be as important as the decision itself. Existing approaches for deep visual recognition are generally opaque and do not output any justification text; contemporary vision-language models can describe image content but fail to take into account class-discriminative image aspects which justify visual predictions. We propose a new model that focuses on the discriminating properties of the visible object, jointly predicts a class label, and explains why the predicted label is appropriate for the image. Through a novel loss function based on sampling and reinforcement learning, our model learns to generate sentences that realize a global sentence property, such as class specificity. Our results on the CUB dataset show that our model is able to generate explanations which are not only consistent with an image but also more discriminative than descriptions produced by existing captioning methods. This paper proposes a reconfigurable model to recognize and detect multiclass (or multiview) objects with large variation in appearance. Compared with well acknowledged hierarchical models, we study two advanced capabilities in hierarchy for object modeling: (i) switch'' variables(i.e. or-nodes) for specifying alternative compositions, and (ii) making local classifiers (i.e. leaf-nodes) shared among different classes. These capabilities enable us to account well for structural variabilities while preserving the model compact. Our model, in the form of an And-Or Graph, comprises four layers: a batch of leaf-nodes with collaborative edges in bottom for localizing object parts, the or-nodes over bottom to activate their children leaf-nodes, the and-nodes to classify objects as a whole, one root-node on the top for switching multiclass classification, which is also an or-node. For model training, we present an EM-type algorithm, namely dynamical structural optimization (DSO), to iteratively determine the structural configuration, (e.g., leaf-node generation associated with their parent or-nodes and shared across other classes), along with optimizing multi-layer parameters. The proposed method is valid on challenging databases, e.g., PASCAL VOC 2007 and UIUC-People, and it achieves state-of-the-arts performance.