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arXiv · 1806.10758

A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks

Sara Hooker·Dumitru Erhan·Pieter-Jan Kindermans·Been Kim
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Abstract

We propose an empirical measure of the approximate accuracy of feature importance estimates in deep neural networks. Our results across several large-scale image classification datasets show that many popular interpretability methods produce estimates of feature importance that are not better than a random designation of feature importance. Only certain ensemble based approaches---VarGrad and SmoothGrad-Squared---outperform such a random assignment of importance. The manner of ensembling remains critical, we show that some approaches do no better then the underlying method but carry a far higher computational burden.

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Sara Hooker, Dumitru Erhan, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Been Kim. 2018-06-28. A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10758

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