Spatial-Temporal Concept Based Explanation of 3D ConvNets

Ying Ji, Yu Wang, Jien Kato; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 15444-15453

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable performance on various tasks. Despite its widespread adoption, the decision procedure of the network still lacks transparency and interpretability, making it difficult to enhance the performance further. Hence, there has been considerable interest in providing explanation and interpretability for CNNs over the last few years. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) investigates the relationship between input images or videos and output predictions. Recent studies have achieved outstanding success in explaining 2D image classification ConvNets. On the other hand, due to the high computation cost and complexity of video data, the explanation of 3D video recognition ConvNets is relatively less studied. And none of them are able to produce a high-level explanation. In this paper, we propose a STCE (Spatial-temporal Concept-based Explanation) framework for interpreting 3D ConvNets. In our approach: (1) videos are represented with high-level supervoxels, similar supervoxels are clustered as a concept, which is straightforward for human to understand; and (2) the interpreting framework calculates a score for each concept, which reflects its significance in the ConvNet decision procedure. Experiments on diverse 3D ConvNets demonstrate that our method can identify global concepts with different importance levels, allowing us to investigate the impact of the concepts on a target task, such as action recognition, in-depth. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yingji425/STCE.