Explainable AI (XAI) methods generally fall into two categories. Post-hoc approaches generate explanations for pre-trained models and are compatible with various neural network architectures. These methods often use feature importance visualizations, such as saliency maps, to indicate which input regions influenced the model’s prediction. Unfortunately, they typically offer a coarse understanding of the model’s decision-making process. In contrast, ante-hoc (inherently explainable) methods rely on specially designed model architectures trained from scratch. A notable subclass of these methods provides explanations through prototypes, representative patches extracted from the training data. However, prototype-based approaches require dedicated architectures, involve specialized training procedures, and perform well only on specific datasets. In this work, we propose EPIC (Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification), a novel approach that bridges the gap between these two paradigms. Like post-hoc methods, EPIC operates on pre-trained models without architectural modifications. Simultaneously, it delivers intuitive, prototype-based explanations inspired by ante-hoc techniques. To the best of our knowledge, EPIC is the first post-hoc method capable of fully replicating the core explanatory power of inherently interpretable models. We evaluate EPIC on benchmark datasets commonly used in prototype-based explanations, such as CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars, alongside large-scale datasets like ImageNet, typically employed by post-hoc methods. EPIC uses prototypes to explain model decisions, providing a flexible and easy-to-understand tool for creating clear, high-quality explanations.

Since its original formulation, Jensen's inequality has played a fundamental role across mathematics, statistics, and machine learning, with its probabilistic version highlighting the nonnegativity of the so-called Jensen's gap, i.e., the difference between the expectation of a convex function and the function at the expectation. Of particular importance is the case when the function is logarithmic, as this setting underpins many applications in variational inference, where the term variational gap is often used interchangeably. Recent research has focused on estimating the size of Jensen's gap and establishing tight lower and upper bounds under various assumptions on the underlying function and distribution, driven by practical challenges such as the intractability of log-likelihood in graphical models like variational autoencoders (VAEs). In this paper, we propose new, general bounds for Jensen's gap that accommodate a broad range of assumptions on both the function and the random variable, with special attention to exponential and logarithmic cases. We provide both analytical and empirical evidence for the performance of our method. Furthermore, we relate our bounds to the PAC-Bayes framework, providing new insights into generalization performance in probabilistic models.

Video processing is generally divided into two main categories: processing of the entire video, which typically yields optimal classification outcomes, and real-time processing, where the objective is to make a decision as promptly as possible. Although the models dedicated to the processing of entire videos are typically well-defined and clearly presented in the literature, this is not the case for online processing, where a plethora of hand-devised methods exist. To address this issue, we present PrAViC, a novel, unified, and theoretically-based adaptation framework for tackling the online classification problem in video data. The initial phase of our study is to establish a mathematical background for the classification of sequential data, with the potential to make a decision at an early stage. This allows us to construct a natural function that encourages the model to return a result much faster. The subsequent phase is to present a straightforward and readily implementable method for adapting offline models to the online setting using recurrent operations. Finally, PrAViC is evaluated by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art offline and online models and datasets. This enables the network to significantly reduce the time required to reach classification decisions while maintaining, or even enhancing, accuracy.

While the capabilities of generative foundational models have advanced rapidly in recent years, methods to prevent harmful and unsafe behaviors remain underdeveloped. Among the pressing challenges in AI safety, machine unlearning (MU) has become increasingly critical to meet upcoming safety regulations. Most existing MU approaches focus on altering the most significant parameters of the model. However, these methods often require fine-tuning substantial portions of the model, resulting in high computational costs and training instabilities, which are typically mitigated by access to the original training dataset. In this work, we address these limitations by leveraging Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to create a compact, low-dimensional projection that enables the selective forgetting of specific data points. We propose Singular Value Decomposition for Efficient Machine Unlearning (SEMU), a novel approach designed to optimize MU in two key aspects. First, SEMU minimizes the number of model parameters that need to be modified, effectively removing unwanted knowledge while making only minimal changes to the model's weights. Second, SEMU eliminates the dependency on the original training dataset, preserving the model's previously acquired knowledge without additional data requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEMU achieves competitive performance while significantly improving efficiency in terms of both data usage and the number of modified parameters.

We present a novel technique for constructing differentiable order-type operations, including soft ranking, soft top-k selection, and soft permutations. Our approach leverages an efficient closed-form formula for the inverse of the function LapSum, defined as the sum of Laplace distributions. This formulation ensures low computational and memory complexity in selecting the highest activations, enabling losses and gradients to be computed in $O(n \log n)$ time. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for high-dimensional vectors and large $k$ values. Furthermore, we provide efficient implementations for both CPU and CUDA environments, underscoring the practicality and scalability of our method for large-scale ranking and differentiable ordering problems.

Prototypical parts-based networks are becoming increasingly popular due to their faithful self-explanations. However, their similarity maps are calculated in the penultimate network layer. Therefore, the receptive field of the prototype activation region often depends on parts of the image outside this region, which can lead to misleading interpretations. We name this undesired behavior a spatial explanation misalignment and introduce an interpretability benchmark with a set of dedicated metrics for quantifying this phenomenon. In addition, we propose a method for misalignment compensation and apply it to existing state-of-the-art models. We show the expressiveness of our benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed compensation methodology through extensive empirical studies.

Interpolating between points is a problem connected simultaneously with finding geodesics and study of generative models. In the case of geodesics, we search for the curves with the shortest length, while in the case of generative models, we typically apply linear interpolation in the latent space. However, this interpolation uses implicitly the fact that Gaussian is unimodal. Thus, the problem of interpolating in the case when the latent density is non-Gaussian is an open problem. In this article, we present a general and unified approach to interpolation, which simultaneously allows us to search for geodesics and interpolating curves in latent space in the case of arbitrary density. Our results have a strong theoretical background based on the introduced quality measure of an interpolating curve. In particular, we show that maximizing the quality measure of the curve can be equivalently understood as a search of geodesic for a certain redefinition of the Riemannian metric on the space. We provide examples in three important cases. First, we show that our approach can be easily applied to finding geodesics on manifolds. Next, we focus our attention in finding interpolations in pretrained generative models. We show that our model effectively works in the case of arbitrary density. Moreover, we can interpolate in the subset of the space consisting of data possessing a given feature. The last case is focused on finding interpolation in the space of chemical compounds.

Many crucial problems in deep learning and statistical inference are caused by a variational gap, i.e., a difference between model evidence (log-likelihood) and evidence lower bound (ELBO). In particular, in a classical VAE setting that involves training via an ELBO cost function, it is difficult to provide a robust comparison of the effects of training between models, since we do not know a log-likelihood of data (but only its lower bound). In this paper, to deal with this problem, we introduce a general and effective upper bound, which allows us to efficiently approximate the evidence of data. We provide extensive theoretical and experimental studies of our approach, including its comparison to the other state-of-the-art upper bounds, as well as its application as a tool for the evaluation of models that were trained on various lower bounds.

Partial Multi-label Learning (PML) is a type of weakly supervised learning where each training instance corresponds to a set of candidate labels, among which only some are true. In this paper, we introduce ProPML, a novel probabilistic approach to this problem that extends the binary cross entropy to the PML setup. In contrast to existing methods, it does not require suboptimal disambiguation and, as such, can be applied to any deep architecture. Furthermore, experiments conducted on artificial and real-world datasets indicate that ProPML outperforms existing approaches, especially for high noise in a candidate set.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly-supervised problem in which one label is assigned to the whole bag of instances. An important class of MIL models is instance-based, where we first classify instances and then aggregate those predictions to obtain a bag label. The most common MIL model is when we consider a bag as positive if at least one of its instances has a positive label. However, this reasoning does not hold in many real-life scenarios, where the positive bag label is often a consequence of a certain percentage of positive instances. To address this issue, we introduce a dedicated instance-based method called ProMIL, based on deep neural networks and Bernstein polynomial estimation. An important advantage of ProMIL is that it can automatically detect the optimal percentage level for decision-making. We show that ProMIL outperforms standard instance-based MIL in real-world medical applications. We make the code available.

We introduce ProtoSeg, a novel model for interpretable semantic image segmentation, which constructs its predictions using similar patches from the training set. To achieve accuracy comparable to baseline methods, we adapt the mechanism of prototypical parts and introduce a diversity loss function that increases the variety of prototypes within each class. We show that ProtoSeg discovers semantic concepts, in contrast to standard segmentation models. Experiments conducted on Pascal VOC and Cityscapes datasets confirm the precision and transparency of the presented method.

Recent years have seen a surge in research on combining deep neural networks with other methods, including decision trees and graphs. There are at least three advantages of incorporating decision trees and graphs: they are easy to interpret since they are based on sequential decisions, they can make decisions faster, and they provide a hierarchy of classes. However, one of the well-known drawbacks of decision trees, as compared to decision graphs, is that decision trees cannot reuse the decision nodes. Nevertheless, decision graphs were not commonly used in deep learning due to the lack of efficient gradient-based training techniques. In this paper, we fill this gap and provide a general paradigm based on Markov processes, which allows for efficient training of the special type of decision graphs, which we call Self-Organizing Neural Graphs (SONG). We provide a theoretical study on SONG, complemented by experiments conducted on Letter, Connect4, MNIST, CIFAR, and TinyImageNet datasets, showing that our method performs on par or better than existing decision models.

Scanning real-life scenes with modern registration devices typically give incomplete point cloud representations, mostly due to the limitations of the scanning process and 3D occlusions. Therefore, completing such partial representations remains a fundamental challenge of many computer vision applications. Most of the existing approaches aim to solve this problem by learning to reconstruct individual 3D objects in a synthetic setup of an uncluttered environment, which is far from a real-life scenario. In this work, we reformulate the problem of point cloud completion into an objects hallucination task. Thus, we introduce a novel autoencoder-based architecture called HyperPocket that disentangles latent representations and, as a result, enables the generation of multiple variants of the completed 3D point clouds. Furthermore, we split point cloud processing into two disjoint data streams and leverage a hypernetwork paradigm to fill the spaces, dubbed pockets, that are left by the missing object parts. As a result, the generated point clouds are smooth, plausible, and geometrically consistent with the scene. Moreover, our method offers competitive performances to the other state-of-the-art models, enabling a plethora of novel applications.

Processing of missing data by modern neural networks, such as CNNs, remains a fundamental, yet unsolved challenge, which naturally arises in many practical applications, like image inpainting or autonomous vehicles and robots. While imputation-based techniques are still one of the most popular solutions, they frequently introduce unreliable information to the data and do not take into account the uncertainty of estimation, which may be destructive for a machine learning model. In this paper, we present MisConv, a general mechanism, for adapting various CNN architectures to process incomplete images. By modeling the distribution of missing values by the Mixture of Factor Analyzers, we cover the spectrum of possible replacements and find an analytical formula for the expected value of convolution operator applied to the incomplete image. The whole framework is realized by matrix operations, which makes MisConv extremely efficient in practice. Experiments performed on various image processing tasks demonstrate that MisConv achieves superior or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods.

We propose OneFlow - a flow-based one-class classifier for anomaly (outlier) detection that finds a minimal volume bounding region. Contrary to density-based methods, OneFlow is constructed in such a way that its result typically does not depend on the structure of outliers. This is caused by the fact that during training the gradient of the cost function is propagated only over the points located near to the decision boundary (behavior similar to the support vectors in SVM). The combination of flow models and a Bernstein quantile estimator allows OneFlow to find a parametric form of bounding region, which can be useful in various applications including describing shapes from 3D point clouds. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms related methods on real-world anomaly detection problems.

In this work, we introduce an extension to ProtoPNet called ProtoPShare which shares prototypical parts between classes. To obtain prototype sharing we prune prototypical parts using a novel data-dependent similarity. Our approach substantially reduces the number of prototypes needed to preserve baseline accuracy and finds prototypical similarities between classes. We show the effectiveness of ProtoPShare on the CUB-200-2011 and the Stanford Cars datasets and confirm the semantic consistency of its prototypical parts in user-study.

We propose a general, theoretically justified mechanism for processing missing data by neural networks. Our idea is to replace typical neuron's response in the first hidden layer by its expected value. This approach can be applied for various types of networks at minimal cost in their modification. Moreover, in contrast to recent approaches, it does not require complete data for training. Experimental results performed on different types of architectures show that our method gives better results than typical imputation strategies and other methods dedicated for incomplete data.