arXiv subjects

Ruth Fong

Publications and source records attributed to Ruth Fong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AI Assistance for Discretionary Work: Increasing Feedback Provision in Higher Education

AI systems increasingly shape human workflows by generating intermediate artifacts that users can adopt, revise, or ignore. While prior work has shown that AI assistance can improve the efficiency and accuracy of required tasks, less is known about whether it can increase participation in discretionary but beneficial work that users often intend to perform but frequently skip. We study this question in the context of personalized feedback provision in higher education, a pedagogically valuable but often optional practice. We conduct a mixed-methods study combining a randomized field experiment and qualitative interviews in a 300-level machine learning course with n=11 teaching assistants (TAs) and n=88 students. Student submissions were randomly assigned to either (1) a treatment condition where TAs received AI-assisted feedback drafts after grading or (2) a control condition without drafts. TAs remained fully in control and could use, edit, or ignore drafts at their discretion. We find that AI-assisted feedback significantly increases feedback provision (+10.8 percentage points, SE=1.1, p<0.001) and feedback length (+39.8 chars, SE=3.45, p<0.001) without negatively affecting student usefulness ratings or reducing time per character. Qualitative findings suggest that AI-assisted drafts function as editable scaffolds that lower barriers to initiating feedback rather than reducing overall effort. Our findings highlight AI's promise for discretionary but beneficial tasks: increasing work that might otherwise go undone while preserving human control over final outcomes.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Interactivity x Explainability: Toward Understanding How Interactivity Can Improve Computer Vision Explanations

Explanations for computer vision models are important tools for interpreting how the underlying models work. However, they are often presented in static formats, which pose challenges for users, including information overload, a gap between semantic and pixel-level information, and limited opportunities for exploration. We investigate interactivity as a mechanism for tackling these issues in three common explanation types: heatmap-based, concept-based, and prototype-based explanations. We conducted a study (N=24), using a bird identification task, involving participants with diverse technical and domain expertise. We found that while interactivity enhances user control, facilitates rapid convergence to relevant information, and allows users to expand their understanding of the model and explanation, it also introduces new challenges. To address these, we provide design recommendations for interactive computer vision explanations, including carefully selected default views, independent input controls, and constrained output spaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Humans, AI, and Context: Understanding End-Users' Trust in a Real-World Computer Vision Application

Trust is an important factor in people's interactions with AI systems. However, there is a lack of empirical studies examining how real end-users trust or distrust the AI system they interact with. Most research investigates one aspect of trust in lab settings with hypothetical end-users. In this paper, we provide a holistic and nuanced understanding of trust in AI through a qualitative case study of a real-world computer vision application. We report findings from interviews with 20 end-users of a popular, AI-based bird identification app where we inquired about their trust in the app from many angles. We find participants perceived the app as trustworthy and trusted it, but selectively accepted app outputs after engaging in verification behaviors, and decided against app adoption in certain high-stakes scenarios. We also find domain knowledge and context are important factors for trust-related assessment and decision-making. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future research on trust in AI.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

UFO: A unified method for controlling Understandability and Faithfulness Objectives in concept-based explanations for CNNs

Concept-based explanations for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) aim to explain model behavior and outputs using a pre-defined set of semantic concepts (e.g., the model recognizes scene class ``bedroom'' based on the presence of concepts ``bed'' and ``pillow''). However, they often do not faithfully (i.e., accurately) characterize the model's behavior and can be too complex for people to understand. Further, little is known about how faithful and understandable different explanation methods are, and how to control these two properties. In this work, we propose UFO, a unified method for controlling Understandability and Faithfulness Objectives in concept-based explanations. UFO formalizes understandability and faithfulness as mathematical objectives and unifies most existing concept-based explanations methods for CNNs. Using UFO, we systematically investigate how explanations change as we turn the knobs of faithfulness and understandability. Our experiments demonstrate a faithfulness-vs-understandability tradeoff: increasing understandability reduces faithfulness. We also provide insights into the ``disagreement problem'' in explainable machine learning, by analyzing when and how concept-based explanations disagree with each other.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Interactive Visual Feature Search

Many visualization techniques have been created to explain the behavior of computer vision models, but they largely consist of static diagrams that convey limited information. Interactive visualizations allow users to more easily interpret a model's behavior, but most are not easily reusable for new models. We introduce Visual Feature Search, a novel interactive visualization that is adaptable to any CNN and can easily be incorporated into a researcher's workflow. Our tool allows a user to highlight an image region and search for images from a given dataset with the most similar model features. We demonstrate how our tool elucidates different aspects of model behavior by performing experiments on a range of applications, such as in medical imaging and wildlife classification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Improving Data-Efficient Fossil Segmentation via Model Editing

Most computer vision research focuses on datasets containing thousands of images of commonplace objects. However, many high-impact datasets, such as those in medicine and the geosciences, contain fine-grain objects that require domain-expert knowledge to recognize and are time-consuming to collect and annotate. As a result, these datasets contain few labeled images, and current machine vision models cannot train intensively on them. Originally introduced to correct large-language models, model-editing techniques in machine learning have been shown to improve model performance using only small amounts of data and additional training. Using a Mask R-CNN to segment ancient reef fossils in rock sample images, we present a two-part paradigm to improve fossil segmentation with few labeled images: we first identify model weaknesses using image perturbations and then mitigate those weaknesses using model editing. Specifically, we apply domain-informed image perturbations to expose the Mask R-CNN's inability to distinguish between different classes of fossils and its inconsistency in segmenting fossils with different textures. To address these shortcomings, we extend an existing model-editing method for correcting systematic mistakes in image classification to image segmentation with no additional labeled data needed and show its effectiveness in decreasing confusion between different kinds of fossils. We also highlight the best settings for model editing in our situation: making a single edit using all relevant pixels in one image (vs. using multiple images, multiple edits, or fewer pixels). Though we focus on fossil segmentation, our approach may be useful in other similar fine-grain segmentation problems where data is limited.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

"Help Me Help the AI": Understanding How Explainability Can Support Human-AI Interaction

Despite the proliferation of explainable AI (XAI) methods, little is understood about end-users' explainability needs and behaviors around XAI explanations. To address this gap and contribute to understanding how explainability can support human-AI interaction, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 20 end-users of a real-world AI application, the Merlin bird identification app, and inquired about their XAI needs, uses, and perceptions. We found that participants desire practically useful information that can improve their collaboration with the AI, more so than technical system details. Relatedly, participants intended to use XAI explanations for various purposes beyond understanding the AI's outputs: calibrating trust, improving their task skills, changing their behavior to supply better inputs to the AI, and giving constructive feedback to developers. Finally, among existing XAI approaches, participants preferred part-based explanations that resemble human reasoning and explanations. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future XAI design.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Overlooked factors in concept-based explanations: Dataset choice, concept learnability, and human capability

Concept-based interpretability methods aim to explain deep neural network model predictions using a predefined set of semantic concepts. These methods evaluate a trained model on a new, "probe" dataset and correlate model predictions with the visual concepts labeled in that dataset. Despite their popularity, they suffer from limitations that are not well-understood and articulated by the literature. In this work, we analyze three commonly overlooked factors in concept-based explanations. First, the choice of the probe dataset has a profound impact on the generated explanations. Our analysis reveals that different probe datasets may lead to very different explanations, and suggests that the explanations are not generalizable outside the probe dataset. Second, we find that concepts in the probe dataset are often less salient and harder to learn than the classes they claim to explain, calling into question the correctness of the explanations. We argue that only visually salient concepts should be used in concept-based explanations. Finally, while existing methods use hundreds or even thousands of concepts, our human studies reveal a much stricter upper bound of 32 concepts or less, beyond which the explanations are much less practically useful. We make suggestions for future development and analysis of concept-based interpretability methods. Code for our analysis and user interface can be found at \url{https://github.com/princetonvisualai/OverlookedFactors}

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Gender Artifacts in Visual Datasets

Gender biases are known to exist within large-scale visual datasets and can be reflected or even amplified in downstream models. Many prior works have proposed methods for mitigating gender biases, often by attempting to remove gender expression information from images. To understand the feasibility and practicality of these approaches, we investigate what $\textit{gender artifacts}$ exist within large-scale visual datasets. We define a $\textit{gender artifact}$ as a visual cue that is correlated with gender, focusing specifically on those cues that are learnable by a modern image classifier and have an interpretable human corollary. Through our analyses, we find that gender artifacts are ubiquitous in the COCO and OpenImages datasets, occurring everywhere from low-level information (e.g., the mean value of the color channels) to the higher-level composition of the image (e.g., pose and location of people). Given the prevalence of gender artifacts, we claim that attempts to remove gender artifacts from such datasets are largely infeasible. Instead, the responsibility lies with researchers and practitioners to be aware that the distribution of images within datasets is highly gendered and hence develop methods which are robust to these distributional shifts across groups.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

ELUDE: Generating interpretable explanations via a decomposition into labelled and unlabelled features

Deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in different areas of machine learning over the past decade; however, the size and complexity of these models make them difficult to understand. In an effort to make them more interpretable, several recent works focus on explaining parts of a deep neural network through human-interpretable, semantic attributes. However, it may be impossible to completely explain complex models using only semantic attributes. In this work, we propose to augment these attributes with a small set of uninterpretable features. Specifically, we develop a novel explanation framework ELUDE (Explanation via Labelled and Unlabelled DEcomposition) that decomposes a model's prediction into two parts: one that is explainable through a linear combination of the semantic attributes, and another that is dependent on the set of uninterpretable features. By identifying the latter, we are able to analyze the "unexplained" portion of the model, obtaining insights into the information used by the model. We show that the set of unlabelled features can generalize to multiple models trained with the same feature space and compare our work to two popular attribute-oriented methods, Interpretable Basis Decomposition and Concept Bottleneck, and discuss the additional insights ELUDE provides.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

HIVE: Evaluating the Human Interpretability of Visual Explanations

As AI technology is increasingly applied to high-impact, high-risk domains, there have been a number of new methods aimed at making AI models more human interpretable. Despite the recent growth of interpretability work, there is a lack of systematic evaluation of proposed techniques. In this work, we introduce HIVE (Human Interpretability of Visual Explanations), a novel human evaluation framework that assesses the utility of explanations to human users in AI-assisted decision making scenarios, and enables falsifiable hypothesis testing, cross-method comparison, and human-centered evaluation of visual interpretability methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of its kind. Using HIVE, we conduct IRB-approved human studies with nearly 1000 participants and evaluate four methods that represent the diversity of computer vision interpretability works: GradCAM, BagNet, ProtoPNet, and ProtoTree. Our results suggest that explanations engender human trust, even for incorrect predictions, yet are not distinct enough for users to distinguish between correct and incorrect predictions. We open-source HIVE to enable future studies and encourage more human-centered approaches to interpretability research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Debiasing Convolutional Neural Networks via Meta Orthogonalization

While deep learning models often achieve strong task performance, their successes are hampered by their inability to disentangle spurious correlations from causative factors, such as when they use protected attributes (e.g., race, gender, etc.) to make decisions. In this work, we tackle the problem of debiasing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in such instances. Building off of existing work on debiasing word embeddings and model interpretability, our Meta Orthogonalization method encourages the CNN representations of different concepts (e.g., gender and class labels) to be orthogonal to one another in activation space while maintaining strong downstream task performance. Through a variety of experiments, we systematically test our method and demonstrate that it significantly mitigates model bias and is competitive against current adversarial debiasing methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Contextual Semantic Interpretability

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are known to learn an image representation that captures concepts relevant to the task, but do so in an implicit way that hampers model interpretability. However, one could argue that such a representation is hidden in the neurons and can be made explicit by teaching the model to recognize semantically interpretable attributes that are present in the scene. We call such an intermediate layer a \emph{semantic bottleneck}. Once the attributes are learned, they can be re-combined to reach the final decision and provide both an accurate prediction and an explicit reasoning behind the CNN decision. In this paper, we look into semantic bottlenecks that capture context: we want attributes to be in groups of a few meaningful elements and participate jointly to the final decision. We use a two-layer semantic bottleneck that gathers attributes into interpretable, sparse groups, allowing them contribute differently to the final output depending on the context. We test our contextual semantic interpretable bottleneck (CSIB) on the task of landscape scenicness estimation and train the semantic interpretable bottleneck using an auxiliary database (SUN Attributes). Our model yields in predictions as accurate as a non-interpretable baseline when applied to a real-world test set of Flickr images, all while providing clear and interpretable explanations for each prediction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims

With the recent wave of progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has come a growing awareness of the large-scale impacts of AI systems, and recognition that existing regulations and norms in industry and academia are insufficient to ensure responsible AI development. In order for AI developers to earn trust from system users, customers, civil society, governments, and other stakeholders that they are building AI responsibly, they will need to make verifiable claims to which they can be held accountable. Those outside of a given organization also need effective means of scrutinizing such claims. This report suggests various steps that different stakeholders can take to improve the verifiability of claims made about AI systems and their associated development processes, with a focus on providing evidence about the safety, security, fairness, and privacy protection of AI systems. We analyze ten mechanisms for this purpose--spanning institutions, software, and hardware--and make recommendations aimed at implementing, exploring, or improving those mechanisms.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

There and Back Again: Revisiting Backpropagation Saliency Methods

Saliency methods seek to explain the predictions of a model by producing an importance map across each input sample. A popular class of such methods is based on backpropagating a signal and analyzing the resulting gradient. Despite much research on such methods, relatively little work has been done to clarify the differences between such methods as well as the desiderata of these techniques. Thus, there is a need for rigorously understanding the relationships between different methods as well as their failure modes. In this work, we conduct a thorough analysis of backpropagation-based saliency methods and propose a single framework under which several such methods can be unified. As a result of our study, we make three additional contributions. First, we use our framework to propose NormGrad, a novel saliency method based on the spatial contribution of gradients of convolutional weights. Second, we combine saliency maps at different layers to test the ability of saliency methods to extract complementary information at different network levels (e.g.~trading off spatial resolution and distinctiveness) and we explain why some methods fail at specific layers (e.g., Grad-CAM anywhere besides the last convolutional layer). Third, we introduce a class-sensitivity metric and a meta-learning inspired paradigm applicable to any saliency method for improving sensitivity to the output class being explained.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

On Compositions of Transformations in Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning

In the image domain, excellent representations can be learned by inducing invariance to content-preserving transformations via noise contrastive learning. In this paper, we generalize contrastive learning to a wider set of transformations, and their compositions, for which either invariance or distinctiveness is sought. We show that it is not immediately obvious how existing methods such as SimCLR can be extended to do so. Instead, we introduce a number of formal requirements that all contrastive formulations must satisfy, and propose a practical construction which satisfies these requirements. In order to maximise the reach of this analysis, we express all components of noise contrastive formulations as the choice of certain generalized transformations of the data (GDTs), including data sampling. We then consider videos as an example of data in which a large variety of transformations are applicable, accounting for the extra modalities -- for which we analyze audio and text -- and the dimension of time. We find that being invariant to certain transformations and distinctive to others is critical to learning effective video representations, improving the state-of-the-art for multiple benchmarks by a large margin, and even surpassing supervised pretraining.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Occlusions for Effective Data Augmentation in Image Classification

Deep networks for visual recognition are known to leverage "easy to recognise" portions of objects such as faces and distinctive texture patterns. The lack of a holistic understanding of objects may increase fragility and overfitting. In recent years, several papers have proposed to address this issue by means of occlusions as a form of data augmentation. However, successes have been limited to tasks such as weak localization and model interpretation, but no benefit was demonstrated on image classification on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we show that, by using a simple technique based on batch augmentation, occlusions as data augmentation can result in better performance on ImageNet for high-capacity models (e.g., ResNet50). We also show that varying amounts of occlusions used during training can be used to study the robustness of different neural network architectures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

NormGrad: Finding the Pixels that Matter for Training

The different families of saliency methods, either based on contrastive signals, closed-form formulas mixing gradients with activations or on perturbation masks, all focus on which parts of an image are responsible for the model's inference. In this paper, we are rather interested by the locations of an image that contribute to the model's training. First, we propose a principled attribution method that we extract from the summation formula used to compute the gradient of the weights for a 1x1 convolutional layer. The resulting formula is fast to compute and can used throughout the network, allowing us to efficiently produce fined-grained importance maps. We will show how to extend it in order to compute saliency maps at any targeted point within the network. Secondly, to make the attribution really specific to the training of the model, we introduce a meta-learning approach for saliency methods by considering an inner optimisation step within the loss. This way, we do not aim at identifying the parts of an image that contribute to the model's output but rather the locations that are responsible for the good training of the model on this image. Conversely, we also show that a similar meta-learning approach can be used to extract the adversarial locations which can lead to the degradation of the model.

cs.CV↗