No Arabic abstract
A number of backpropagation-based approaches such as DeConvNets, vanilla Gradient Visualization and Guided Backpropagation have been proposed to better understand individual decisions of deep convolutional neural networks. The saliency maps produced by them are proven to be non-discriminative. Recently, the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) approach was proposed to explain the classification decisions of rectifier neural networks. In this work, we evaluate the discriminativeness of the generated explanations and analyze the theoretical foundation of LRP, i.e. Deep Taylor Decomposition. The experiments and analysis conclude that the explanations generated by LRP are not class-discriminative. Based on LRP, we propose Contrastive Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (CLRP), which is capable of producing instance-specific, class-discriminative, pixel-wise explanations. In the experiments, we use the CLRP to explain the decisions and understand the difference between neurons in individual classification decisions. We also evaluate the explanations quantitatively with a Pointing Game and an ablation study. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that the CLRP generates better explanations than the LRP. The code is available.
We revisit the importance of the individual units in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for visual recognition. By conducting unit ablation experiments on CNNs trained on large scale image datasets, we demonstrate that, though ablating any individual unit does not hurt overall classification accuracy, it does lead to significant damage on the accuracy of specific classes. This result shows that an individual unit is specialized to encode information relevant to a subset of classes. We compute the correlation between the accuracy drop under unit ablation and various attributes of an individual unit such as class selectivity and weight L1 norm. We confirm that unit attributes such as class selectivity are a poor predictor for impact on overall accuracy as found previously in recent work cite{morcos2018importance}. However, our results show that class selectivity along with other attributes are good predictors of the importance of one unit to individual classes. We evaluate the impact of random rotation, batch normalization, and dropout to the importance of units to specific classes. Our results show that units with high selectivity play an important role in network classification power at the individual class level. Understanding and interpreting the behavior of these units is necessary and meaningful.
Referring expression comprehension aims to localize objects identified by natural language descriptions. This is a challenging task as it requires understanding of both visual and language domains. One nature is that each object can be described by synonymous sentences with paraphrases, and such varieties in languages have critical impact on learning a comprehension model. While prior work usually treats each sentence and attends it to an object separately, we focus on learning a referring expression comprehension model that considers the property in synonymous sentences. To this end, we develop an end-to-end trainable framework to learn contrastive features on the image and object instance levels, where features extracted from synonymous sentences to describe the same object should be closer to each other after mapping to the visual domain. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm on several benchmark datasets, and demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, since the varieties in expressions become larger across datasets when they describe objects in different ways, we present the cross-dataset and transfer learning settings to validate the ability of our learned transferable features.
The pre-trained neural models have recently achieved impressive performances in understanding multimodal content. However, it is still very challenging to pre-train neural models for video and language understanding, especially for Chinese video-language data, due to the following reasons. Firstly, existing video-language pre-training algorithms mainly focus on the co-occurrence of words and video frames, but ignore other valuable semantic and structure information of video-language content, e.g., sequential order and spatiotemporal relationships. Secondly, there exist conflicts between video sentence alignment and other proxy tasks. Thirdly, there is a lack of large-scale and high-quality Chinese video-language datasets (e.g., including 10 million unique videos), which are the fundamental success conditions for pre-training techniques. In this work, we propose a novel video-language understanding framework named VICTOR, which stands for VIdeo-language understanding via Contrastive mulTimOdal pRe-training. Besides general proxy tasks such as masked language modeling, VICTOR constructs several novel proxy tasks under the contrastive learning paradigm, making the model be more robust and able to capture more complex multimodal semantic and structural relationships from different perspectives. VICTOR is trained on a large-scale Chinese video-language dataset, including over 10 million complete videos with corresponding high-quality textual descriptions. We apply the pre-trained VICTOR model to a series of downstream applications and demonstrate its superior performances, comparing against the state-of-the-art pre-training methods such as VideoBERT and UniVL. The codes and trained checkpoints will be publicly available to nourish further developments of the research community.
Contrasting the previous evidence that neurons in the later layers of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) respond to complex object shapes, recent studies have shown that CNNs actually exhibit a `texture bias: given an image with both texture and shape cues (e.g., a stylized image), a CNN is biased towards predicting the category corresponding to the texture. However, these previous studies conduct experiments on the final classification output of the network, and fail to robustly evaluate the bias contained (i) in the latent representations, and (ii) on a per-pixel level. In this paper, we design a series of experiments that overcome these issues. We do this with the goal of better understanding what type of shape information contained in the network is discriminative, where shape information is encoded, as well as when the network learns about object shape during training. We show that a network learns the majority of overall shape information at the first few epochs of training and that this information is largely encoded in the last few layers of a CNN. Finally, we show that the encoding of shape does not imply the encoding of localized per-pixel semantic information. The experimental results and findings provide a more accurate understanding of the behaviour of current CNNs, thus helping to inform future design choices.
After building a classifier with modern tools of machine learning we typically have a black box at hand that is able to predict well for unseen data. Thus, we get an answer to the question what is the most likely label of a given unseen data point. However, most methods will provide no answer why the model predicted the particular label for a single instance and what features were most influential for that particular instance. The only method that is currently able to provide such explanations are decision trees. This paper proposes a procedure which (based on a set of assumptions) allows to explain the decisions of any classification method.