In complex inferential tasks like question answering, machine learning models must confront two challenges: the need to implement a compositional reasoning process, and, in many applications, the need for this reasoning process to be interpretable to assist users in both development and prediction. Existing models designed to produce interpretable traces of their decision-making process typically require these traces to be supervised at training time. In this paper, we present a novel neural modular approach that performs compositional reasoning by automatically inducing a desired sub-task decomposition without relying on strong supervision. Our model allows linking different reasoning tasks though shared modules that handle common routines across tasks. Experiments show that the model is more interpretable to human evaluators compared to other state-of-the-art models: users can better understand the model's underlying reasoning procedure and predict when it will succeed or fail based on observing its intermediate outputs.
An alternative line of work investigates the extent to which models can be explicitly designed from the outset to provide enhanced interpretability, where main focus of study has been visual attention @cite_17 @cite_31 . While the various modular approaches described above are sometimes described as interpretable'' @cite_14 , we are not aware of any research evaluating this in practice. In the present work, our goal is to evaluate whether this kind of explicit modular structure, and not just iterated attention, improves interpretability in concrete evaluation scenarios.
@cite_31 @cite_14 @cite_17
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Deep models are the defacto standard in visual decision models due to their impressive performance on a wide array of visual tasks. However, they are frequently seen as opaque and are unable to explain their decisions. In contrast, humans can justify their decisions with natural language and point to the evidence in the visual world which led to their decisions. We postulate that deep models can do this as well and propose our Pointing and Justification (PJ-X) model which can justify its decision with a sentence and point to the evidence by introspecting its decision and explanation process using an attention mechanism. Unfortunately there is no dataset available with reference explanations for visual decision making. We thus collect two datasets in two domains where it is interesting and challenging to explain decisions. First, we extend the visual question answering task to not only provide an answer but also a natural language explanation for the answer. Second, we focus on explaining human activities which is traditionally more challenging than object classification. We extensively evaluate our PJ-X model, both on the justification and pointing tasks, by comparing it to prior models and ablations using both automatic and human evaluations. Natural language questions are inherently compositional, and many are most easily answered by reasoning about their decomposition into modular sub-problems. For example, to answer “is there an equal number of balls and boxes?” we can look for balls, look for boxes, count them, and compare the results. The recently proposed Neural Module Network (NMN) architecture [3, 2] implements this approach to question answering by parsing questions into linguistic substructures and assembling question-specific deep networks from smaller modules that each solve one subtask. However, existing NMN implementations rely on brittle off-the-shelf parsers, and are restricted to the module configurations proposed by these parsers rather than learning them from data. In this paper, we propose End-to-End Module Networks (N2NMNs), which learn to reason by directly predicting instance-specific network layouts without the aid of a parser. Our model learns to generate network structures (by imitating expert demonstrations) while simultaneously learning network parameters (using the downstream task loss). Experimental results on the new CLEVR dataset targeted at compositional question answering show that N2NMNs achieve an error reduction of nearly 50 relative to state-of-theart attentional approaches, while discovering interpretable network architectures specialized for each question. Applying convolutional neural networks to large images is computationally expensive because the amount of computation scales linearly with the number of image pixels. We present a novel recurrent neural network model that is capable of extracting information from an image or video by adaptively selecting a sequence of regions or locations and only processing the selected regions at high resolution. Like convolutional neural networks, the proposed model has a degree of translation invariance built-in, but the amount of computation it performs can be controlled independently of the input image size. While the model is non-differentiable, it can be trained using reinforcement learning methods to learn task-specific policies. We evaluate our model on several image classification tasks, where it significantly outperforms a convolutional neural network baseline on cluttered images, and on a dynamic visual control problem, where it learns to track a simple object without an explicit training signal for doing so.