As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated superhuman performance in many computer vision tasks, there is an increasing interest in revealing the complex internal mechanisms of DNNs. In this paper, we propose Relative Attributing Propagation (RAP), which decomposes the output predictions of DNNs with a new perspective that precisely separates the positive and negative attributions. By identifying the fundamental causes of activation and the proper inversion of relevance, RAP allows each neuron to be assigned an actual contribution to the output. Furthermore, we devise pragmatic methods to handle the effect of bias and batch normalization properly in the attributing procedures. Therefore, our method makes it possible to interpret various kinds of very deep neural network models with clear and attentive visualizations of positive and negative attributions. By utilizing the region perturbation method and comparing the distribution of attributions for a quantitative evaluation, we verify the correctness of our RAP whether the positive and negative attributions correctly account for each meaning. The positive and negative attributions propagated by RAP show the characteristics of vulnerability and robustness to the distortion of the corresponding pixels, respectively. We apply RAP to DNN models; VGG-16, ResNet-50 and Inception-V3, demonstrating its generation of more intuitive and improved interpretation compared to the existing attribution methods.
From the standpoint of explaining the decision of a DNN, the contributions of the input are propagated backward, resulting in a redistribution of relevance in the pixel space. Sensitivity analysis visualizes the sensitivities of input images classified by a DNN while explaining the factors that reduce increase the evidence for the predicted results @cite_32 . @cite_8 proposed a deconvolution method to identify the patterns of a predicted input image from a DNN. Layerwise relevance propagation (LRP) @cite_15 was introduced to backpropagate a relevance, which makes the network output become fully redistributed throughout the layers of a DNN. @cite_34 showed that the LRP algorithm qualitatively and quantitatively provides a better explanation than do either the sensitivity-based approach or the deconvolution method.
@cite_15 @cite_34 @cite_32 @cite_8
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Understanding and interpreting classification decisions of automated image classification systems is of high value in many applications, as it allows to verify the reasoning of the system and provides additional information to the human expert. Although machine learning methods are solving very successfully a plethora of tasks, they have in most cases the disadvantage of acting as a black box, not providing any information about what made them arrive at a particular decision. This work proposes a general solution to the problem of understanding classification decisions by pixel-wise decomposition of nonlinear classifiers. We introduce a methodology that allows to visualize the contributions of single pixels to predictions for kernel-based classifiers over Bag of Words features and for multilayered neural networks. These pixel contributions can be visualized as heatmaps and are provided to a human expert who can intuitively not only verify the validity of the classification decision, but also focus further analysis on regions of potential interest. We evaluate our method for classifiers trained on PASCAL VOC 2009 images, synthetic image data containing geometric shapes, the MNIST handwritten digits data set and for the pre-trained ImageNet model available as part of the Caffe open source package. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance in complex machine learning tasks such as image classification or speech recognition. However, due to their multilayer nonlinear structure, they are not transparent, i.e., it is hard to grasp what makes them arrive at a particular classification or recognition decision, given a new unseen data sample. Recently, several approaches have been proposed enabling one to understand and interpret the reasoning embodied in a DNN for a single test image. These methods quantify the “importance” of individual pixels with respect to the classification decision and allow a visualization in terms of a heatmap in pixel input space. While the usefulness of heatmaps can be judged subjectively by a human, an objective quality measure is missing. In this paper, we present a general methodology based on region perturbation for evaluating ordered collections of pixels such as heatmaps. We compare heatmaps computed by three different methods on the SUN397, ILSVRC2012, and MIT Places data sets. Our main result is that the recently proposed layer-wise relevance propagation algorithm qualitatively and quantitatively provides a better explanation of what made a DNN arrive at a particular classification decision than the sensitivity-based approach or the deconvolution method. We provide theoretical arguments to explain this result and discuss its practical implications. Finally, we investigate the use of heatmaps for unsupervised assessment of the neural network performance. After building a classifier with modern tools of machine learning we typically have a black box at hand that is able to predict well for unseen data. Thus, we get an answer to the question what is the most likely label of a given unseen data point. However, most methods will provide no answer why the model predicted a particular label for a single instance and what features were most influential for that particular instance. The only method that is currently able to provide such explanations are decision trees. This paper proposes a procedure which (based on a set of assumptions) allows to explain the decisions of any classification method. Large Convolutional Network models have recently demonstrated impressive classification performance on the ImageNet benchmark [18]. However there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. In this paper we explore both issues. We introduce a novel visualization technique that gives insight into the function of intermediate feature layers and the operation of the classifier. Used in a diagnostic role, these visualizations allow us to find model architectures that outperform on the ImageNet classification benchmark. We also perform an ablation study to discover the performance contribution from different model layers. We show our ImageNet model generalizes well to other datasets: when the softmax classifier is retrained, it convincingly beats the current state-of-the-art results on Caltech-101 and Caltech-256 datasets.