Less is More: Discovering Concise Network Explanations

Published: 02 Mar 2024, Last Modified: 24 Jun 2024ICLR 2024 Workshop Re-Align PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Track: long paper (up to 9 pages)
Keywords: concept, explanations, human, expert, features, similarity, XAI, interpretability
TL;DR: We propose a new method to reduce the complexity of concept-based explanations for users and evaluate our method by measuring the reduced concepts alignment with human-expert features.
Abstract: We introduce Discovering Conceptual Network Explanations (DCNE), a new approach for generating human-comprehensible visual explanations to enhance the interpretability of deep neural image classifiers. Our method automatically finds visual explanations that are critical for discriminating between classes. This is achieved by simultaneously optimizing three criteria: the explanations should be few, diverse, and human-interpretable. Our approach builds on the recently introduced Concept Relevance Propagation (CRP) explainability method. While CRP is effective at describing individual neuronal activations, it generates too many concepts, which impacts human comprehension. Instead, DCNE selects the few most important explanations. We introduce a new evaluation dataset centered on the challenging task of classifying birds, enabling us to compare the alignment of DCNE's explanations to those of human expert-defined ones. Compared to existing eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, DCNE has a desirable trade-off between conciseness and completeness when summarizing network explanations. It produces 1/30 of CRP's explanations while only resulting in a slight reduction in explanation quality. DCNE represents a step forward in making neural network decisions accessible and interpretable to humans, providing a valuable tool for both researchers and practitioners in XAI and model alignment.
Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.
Submission Number: 45
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