The DOI matches its Crossref record; 47 of the 51 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Evaluating the Visualization of What a Deep Neural Network Has Learned
Abstract
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.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Samek, W., Binder, A., Montavon, G., Lapuschkin, S., & Muller, K.-R.
- Affiliations
- Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute (DE)
- Singapore University of Technology and Design (SG)
- Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
- Published
- 2017-11
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 2660-2673
- ISSN
- 2162-237X (ISSN-L)
- 2162-2388
- OpenAlex
- W2240067561
- Cited by
- 1,164
- References
- 51
- Citations by year
- 2026: 120 · 2025: 105 · 2024: 139 · 2023: 163 · 2022: 147 · 2021: 171 · 2020: 123 · 2019: 92 · 2018: 66 · 2017: 26
- FWCI
- 53.43
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Publikationsdatenbank der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion)
- Fraunhofer-Publica (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Brain Korea 21 Plus Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea Funded by the Ministry of Education
- DFG (MU 987/17-1)
- German Ministry for Education and Research as Berlin Big Data Center (01IS14013A)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Keywords
- deep neural network interpretability, layer-wise relevance propagation, deconvolution, explainable AI, image classification
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