arXiv Machine Learning

CASE: Contrastive Activation for Class-Sensitive Explanations

The paper introduces a diagnostic test for class sensitivity in saliency methods, revealing that many popular techniques produce nearly identical explanations regardless of the predicted class. This limitation appears across different architectures and datasets, indicating a structural issue. To address this, the authors propose CASE, a contrastive explanation method that isolates features uniquely discriminative for the predicted class, and demonstrate its improved fidelity and class specificity through experiments.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
6d ago

Evaluating Explanation Methods by the Predictors They Induce

The paper introduces a straightforward evaluation method for explanation techniques: by converting each explanation into a predictor that sums the feature effects, the authors assess how accurately this predictor reproduces the original model’s predictions on unseen data. This approach applies to any explanation expressible as a function of features and is demonstrated on PDP, ALE, SHAP, and LIME. The authors theoretically show that summing partial dependence curves yields the optimal additive summary when features are independent, but this property fails with dependent features, and empirical results across diverse datasets confirm that the best-performing method depends on feature dependence.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Evaluating Explanation Methods by the Predictors They Induce

The paper proposes a new evaluation test for explanation methods: if an explanation accurately captures how a model uses its features, one should be able to reconstruct the model’s predictions from it. The authors convert explanations into predictors by summing feature effects and assess how well these predictors reproduce the model on unseen data, without any fitting. They apply this test to partial dependence plots, accumulated local effects, SHAP, and LIME across multiple datasets and model families, showing that the best method depends on feature dependence and that some existing quality metrics can favor flawed explanations.

By Jacob Selb{\ae}k, Hugo L. Hammer
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Counterfactual Contrastive Analysis

The paper introduces a classifier‑free method for generating visual counterfactual explanations (VCEs) using Contrastive Analysis (CA). By separating generative factors common to two datasets from those specific to each class, the approach swaps only the salient factors to produce counterfactual images, thereby avoiding reliance on classifier decision boundaries. Leveraging StyleGAN2’s high‑quality synthesis and a feature‑space latent representation, the method supports multiple salient factors per dataset and achieves superior counterfactual quality on three medical imaging datasets.

By Yunlong He, Pietro Gori
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Are Classification Robustness and Explanation Robustness Really Strongly Correlated? An Analysis Through Input Loss Landscape

arXiv:2403. 06013v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper delves into the critical area of deep learning robustness, challenging the conventional belief that classification robustness and explanation robustness in image classification systems are inherently correlated.

By Tiejin Chen, Wenwang Huang, Linsey Pang, Dongsheng Luo, Hua Wei
arXiv AI
Sep 1

ICON Decomposition: Auditing Deep Neural Networks with Multivariate Variance-based Concept-level Explanations

arXiv:2608.26083v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep neural networks often exploit spurious associations, a failure known as shortcut learning. Auditing for shortcuts requires testing many...

By Roshan Prakash Rane, Marco Simnacher, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marc-Andre Schulz, Nys Tjade Siegel, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Wojciech Samek, Sonja Greven, Kerstin Ritter