Iterative and Adaptive Sampling with Spatial Attention for Black-Box Model Explanations

Bhavan Vasu, Chengjiang Long; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 2960-2969

Deep neural networks have achieved great success in many real-world applications, yet it remains unclear and difficult to explain their decision-making process to an end user. In this paper, we address the explainable AI problem for deep neural networks with our proposed framework, named IASSA that generates an importance map indicating how salient each pixel is for the model's prediction with an iterative and adaptive sampling module. We employ an affinity matrix calculated on multi-level deep learning features to explore long-range pixel-to-pixel correlation, which can shift the saliency values guided by our long-range and parameter-free spatial attention. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show that our proposed approach matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art black-box explanation methods.