Modeling Latent Attention Within Neural Networks

Christopher Grimm, Dilip Arumugam, Siddharth Karamcheti, David Abel, Lawson L.S. Wong, Michael L. Littman

Abstract: Deep neural networks are able to solve tasks across a variety of domains and modalities of data. Despite many empirical successes, we lack the ability to clearly understand and interpret the learned mechanisms that contribute to such effective behaviors and more critically, failure modes. In this work, we present a general method for visualizing an arbitrary neural network's inner mechanisms and their power and limitations. Our dataset-centric method produces visualizations of how a trained network attends to components of its inputs. The computed "attention masks" support improved interpretability by highlighting which input attributes are critical in determining output. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on a variety of deep neural network architectures in domains from computer vision and natural language processing. The primary contribution of our approach is an interpretable visualization of attention that provides unique insights into the network's underlying decision-making process irrespective of the data modality.

TL;DR: We develop a technique to visualize attention mechanisms in arbitrary neural networks.

Keywords: deep learning, neural network, attention, attention mechanism, interpretability, visualization

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/modeling-latent-attention-within-neural/code)