We propose a data-driven approach to explicitly learn the progressive encoding of a continuous source, which is successively decoded with increasing levels of quality and with the aid of correlated side information. This setup refers to the successive refinement of the Wyner-Ziv coding problem. Assuming ideal Slepian-Wolf coding, our approach employs recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to learn layered encoders and decoders for the quadratic Gaussian case. The models are trained by minimizing a variational bound on the rate-distortion function of the successively refined Wyner-Ziv coding problem. We demonstrate that RNNs can explicitly retrieve layered binning solutions akin to scalable nested quantization. Moreover, the rate-distortion performance of the scheme is on par with the corresponding monolithic Wyner-Ziv coding approach and is close to the rate-distortion bound.

We present two deep unfolding neural networks for the simultaneous tasks of background subtraction and foreground detection in video. Unlike conventional neural networks based on deep feature extraction, we incorporate domain-knowledge models by considering a masked variation of the robust principal component analysis problem (RPCA). With this approach, we separate video clips into low-rank and sparse components, respectively corresponding to the backgrounds and foreground masks indicating the presence of moving objects. Our models, coined ROMAN-S and ROMAN-R, map the iterations of two alternating direction of multipliers methods (ADMM) to trainable convolutional layers, and the proximal operators are mapped to non-linear activation functions with trainable thresholds. This approach leads to lightweight networks with enhanced interpretability that can be trained on limited data. In ROMAN-S, the correlation in time of successive binary masks is controlled with side-information based on$\ell _{1}$-$\ell _{1}$minimization. ROMAN-R enhances the foreground detection by learning a dictionary of atoms to represent the moving foreground in a high-dimensional feature space and by using reweighted-$\ell _{1}$-$\ell _{1}$minimization. Experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real video datasets, for which we also include an analysis of the generalization to unseen clips. Comparisons are made with existing deep unfolding RPCA neural networks, which do not use a mask formulation for the foreground, and with a 3D U-Net baseline. Results show that our proposed models outperform other deep unfolding networks, as well as the untrained optimization algorithms. ROMAN-R, in particular, is competitive with the U-Net baseline for foreground detection, with the additional advantage of providing video backgrounds and requiring substantially fewer training parameters and smaller training sets.

Contrastive learning has revolutionized the field of computer vision, learning rich representations from unlabeled data, which generalize well to diverse vision tasks. Consequently, it has become increasingly important to explain these approaches and understand their inner workings mechanisms. Given that contrastive models are trained with interdependent and interacting inputs and aim to learn invariance through data augmentation, the existing methods for explaining single-image systems (e.g., image classification models) are inadequate as they fail to account for these factors and typically assume independent inputs. Additionally, there is a lack of evaluation metrics designed to assess pairs of explanations, and no analytical studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of different techniques used to explaining contrastive learning. In this work, we design visual explanation methods that contribute towards understanding similarity learning tasks from pairs of images. We further adapt existing metrics, used to evaluate visual explanations of image classification systems, to suit pairs of explanations and evaluate our proposed methods with these metrics. Finally, we present a thorough analysis of visual explainability methods for contrastive learning, establish their correlation with downstream tasks and demonstrate the potential of our approaches to investigate their merits and drawbacks.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) attempts to help humans understand machine learning decisions better and has been identified as a critical component toward increasing the trustworthiness of complex black-box systems, such as deep neural networks. In this article, we propose a generic and comprehensive framework named SNIPPET and create a user interface for the subjective evaluation of visual explanations, focusing on finding human-friendly explanations. SNIPPET considers human-centered evaluation tasks and incorporates the collection of human annotations. These annotations can serve as valuable feedback to validate the qualitative results obtained from the subjective assessment tasks. Moreover, we consider different user background categories during the evaluation process to ensure diverse perspectives and comprehensive evaluation. We demonstrate SNIPPET on a DeepFake face dataset. Distinguishing real from fake faces is a non-trivial task even for humans that depends on rather subtle features, making it a challenging use case. Using SNIPPET, we evaluate four popular XAI methods which provide visual explanations: Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation, attention rollout, and Transformer Attribution. Based on our experimental results, we observe preference variations among different user categories. We find that most people are more favorable to the explanations of rollout. Moreover, when it comes to XAI-assisted understanding, those who have no or lack relevant background knowledge often consider that visual explanations are insufficient to help them understand. We open-source our framework for continued data collection and annotation at https://github.com/XAI-SubjEvaluation/SNIPPET .

Conditional random fields (CRFs), a particular type of graph neural networks (GNNs), can be used to make structured predictions in machine learning, with various applications from image processing and natural language processing to recommender systems. CRFs refine the prediction of a sample by taking into account its context information. However, there is a lack of work on post-hoc explanation approaches to CRFs, especially when the model is softmax-activated like the deep mean field network (DMFN). In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing a layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method based on deep Taylor decomposition to explain CRFs, especially the DMFN model. The method considers the intermediate softmax activation layers in DMFN. We use two evaluation settings: top K% deletion and insertion to evaluate the method. Experimental studies on fake news detection using the DMFN model prove the effectiveness of our explanation method compared to the other baseline methods.

This paper proposes InteractionLIME: a model-agnostic attribution technique to explain deep models predictions in terms of feature interactions. Specifically, we regress a bilinear form to approximate the output of two-input models, by sampling perturbations of both inputs simultaneously. Upon training, we retrieve a global explanation and a set of feature partitioning maps via the singular value decomposition of the learned interaction matrix of the bilinear model. We demonstrate InteractionLIME on vision and text-vision contrastive models, using visual examples and quantitative evaluation metrics. Our results show that the bilinear model successfully retrieves important interacting features from both inputs, while strongly reducing the occurrence of incomplete or asymmetric explanations produced by a linear model.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are powerful models with the ability to model sequential data. However, they are often viewed as black-boxes and lack in interpretability. Deep unfolding methods take a step towards interpretability by designing deep neural networks as learned variations of iterative optimization algorithms to solve various signal processing tasks. In this paper, we explore theoretical aspects of deep unfolding RNNs in terms of their generalization ability. Specifically, we derive generalization error bounds for a class of deep unfolding RNNs via Rademacher complexity analysis. To our knowledge, these are the first generalization bounds proposed for deep unfolding RNNs. We show theoretically that our bounds are tighter than similar ones for other recent RNNs, in terms of the number of timesteps. By training models in a classification setting, we demonstrate that deep unfolding RNNs can outperform traditional RNNs in standard sequence classification tasks. These experiments allow us to relate the empirical generalization error to the theoretical bounds. In particular, we show that over-parametrized deep unfolding models like reweighted-RNN achieve tight theoretical error bounds with minimal decrease in accuracy, when trained with explicit regularization.

Deep unfolding methods design deep neural networks as learned variations of optimization algorithms through the unrolling of their iterations. These networks have been shown to achieve faster convergence and higher accuracy than the original optimization methods. In this line of research, this paper presents novel interpretable deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs), designed by the unfolding of iterative algorithms that solve the task of sequential signal reconstruction (in particular, video reconstruction). The proposed networks are designed by accounting that video frames’ patches have a sparse representation and the temporal difference between consecutive representations is also sparse. Specifically, we design an interpretable deep RNN (coined reweighted-RNN) by unrolling the iterations of a proximal method that solves a reweighted version of the$\ell _{1}$-$\ell _{1}$minimization problem. Due to the underlying minimization model, our reweighted-RNN has a different thresholding function (alias, different activation function) for each hidden unit in each layer. In this way, it has higher network expressivity than existing deep unfolding RNN models. We also present the derivative$\ell _{1}$-$\ell _{1}$-RNN model, which is obtained by unfolding a proximal method for the$\ell _{1}$-$\ell _{1}$minimization problem. We apply the proposed interpretable RNNs to the task of video frame reconstruction from low-dimensional measurements, that is, sequential video frame reconstruction. The experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that the proposed deep RNNs outperform various RNN models.