Incorporating uncertainty is crucial to provide trustworthy explanations of deep learning models. Recent works have demonstrated how uncertainty modeling can be particularly important in the unsupervised field of representation learning explainable artificial intelligence (R-XAI). Current R-XAI methods provide uncertainty by measuring variability in the importance score. However, they fail to provide meaningful estimates of whether a pixel is certainly important or not. In this work, we propose a new R-XAI method called REPEAT that addresses the key question of whether or not a pixel is certainly important. REPEAT leverages the stochasticity of current R-XAI methods to produce multiple estimates of importance, thus considering each pixel in an image as a Bernoulli random variable that is either important or unimportant. From these Bernoulli random variables we can directly estimate the importance of a pixel and its associated certainty, thus enabling users to determine certainty in pixel importance. Our extensive evaluation shows that REPEAT gives certainty estimates that are more intuitive, better at detecting out-of-distribution data, and more concise.

Most Multi-view Clustering approaches assume that all views are available for clustering. However, this assumption is often unrealistic as views are incrementally accumulated over time, leading to a need for continual multi-view clustering (CMVC) methods. Current approaches to CMVC leverage late fusion-based approaches, where a new model is typically learned individually for each view to obtain the corresponding partition matrix, and then used to update a consensus matrix via a moving average. These approaches are prone to view-specific noise and struggle to adapt to large gaps between different views. To address these shortcomings, we reconsider CMVC from the perspective of domain adaptation and propose AdaptCMVC, which learns how to incrementally accumulate knowledge of new views as they become available and prevents catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, a self-training framework is introduced to extend the model to new views, particularly designed to be robust to view-specific noise. Further, to combat catastrophic forgetting, a structure alignment mechanism is proposed to enable the model to explore the global group structure across multiple views. Experiments on several multi-view benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on the CMVC task. The code is available at: AdaptCMVC.

Unsupervised representation learning has become an important ingredient of today's deep learning systems. However, only a few methods exist that explain a learned vector embedding in the sense of providing information about which parts of an input are the most important for its representation. These methods generate the explanation for a given input after the model has been evaluated and tend to produce either inaccurate explanations or are slow, which limits their practical use. To address these limitations, we introduce the Neural Explanation Masks (NEM) framework, which turns a fixed representation model into a self-explaining model by augmenting it with a masking network. This network provides occlusion-based explanations in parallel to computing the representations during inference. We present an instance of this framework, the NEM-U (NEM using U-net structure) architecture, which leverages similarities between segmentation and occlusion-based masks. Our experiments show that NEM-U generates explanations faster and with lower complexity compared to the current state-of-the-art while maintaining high accuracy as measured by locality.

Distance-based classification is frequently used in transductive few-shot learning (FSL). However, due to the high-dimensionality of image representations, FSL classifiers are prone to suffer from the hubness problem, where a few points (hubs) occur frequently in multiple nearest neighbour lists of other points. Hubness negatively impacts distance-based classification when hubs from one class appear often among the nearest neighbors of points from another class, degrading the classifier's performance. To address the hubness problem in FSL, we first prove that hubness can be eliminated by distributing representations uniformly on the hypersphere. We then propose two new approaches to embed representations on the hypersphere, which we prove optimize a tradeoff between uniformity and local similarity preservation - reducing hubness while retaining class structure. Our experiments show that the proposed methods reduce hubness, and significantly improves transductive FSL accuracy for a wide range of classifiers11Code available at https://github.com/uitml/noHub..

Abstract Despite the significant improvements that self-supervised representation learning has led to when learning from unlabeled data, no methods have been developed that explain what influences the learned representation. We address this need through our proposed approach, RELAX, which is the first approach for attribution-based explanations of representations. Our approach can also model the uncertainty in its explanations, which is essential to produce trustworthy explanations. RELAX explains representations by measuring similarities in the representation space between an input and masked out versions of itself, providing intuitive explanations that significantly outperform the gradient-based baselines. We provide theoretical interpretations of RELAX and conduct a novel analysis of feature extractors trained using supervised and unsupervised learning, providing insights into different learning strategies. Moreover, we conduct a user study to assess how well the proposed approach aligns with human intuition and show that the proposed method outperforms the baselines in both the quantitative and human evaluation studies. Finally, we illustrate the usability of RELAX in several use cases and highlight that incorporating uncertainty can be essential for providing faithful explanations, taking a crucial step towards explaining representations.

Multivariate time series often contain missing values for reasons such as failures in data collection mechanisms. Since these missing values can complicate the analysis of time series data, imputation techniques are typically used to deal with this issue. However, the quality of the imputation directly affects the performance of downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a selective imputation method that identifies a subset of timesteps with missing values to impute in a multivariate time series dataset. This selection, which will result in shorter and simpler time series, is based on both reducing the uncertainty of the imputations and representing the original time series as good as possible. In particular, the method uses multi-objective optimization techniques to select the optimal set of points, and in this selection process, we leverage the beneficial properties of the Multi-task Gaussian Process (MGP). The method is applied to different datasets to analyze the quality of the imputations and the performance obtained in downstream tasks, such as classification or anomaly detection. The results show that much shorter and simpler time series are able to maintain or even improve both the quality of the imputations and the performance of the downstream tasks.

The lack of labeled data is a key challenge for learning useful representation from time series data. However, an unsupervised representation framework that is capable of producing high quality representations could be of great value. It is key to enabling transfer learning, which is especially beneficial for medical applications, where there is an abundance of data but labeling is costly and time consuming. We propose an unsupervised contrastive learning framework that is motivated from the perspective of label smoothing. The proposed approach uses a novel contrastive loss that naturally exploits a data augmentation scheme in which new samples are generated by mixing two data samples with a mixing component. The task in the proposed framework is to predict the mixing component, which is utilized as soft targets in the loss function. Experiments demonstrate the framework’s superior performance compared to other representation learning approaches on both univariate and multivariate time series and illustrate its benefits for transfer learning for clinical time series.

Deep learning-based support systems have demonstrated encouraging results in numerous clinical applications involving the processing of time series data. While such systems often are very accurate, they have no inherent mechanism for explaining what influenced the predictions, which is critical for clinical tasks. However, existing explainability techniques lack an important component for trustworthy and reliable decision support, namely a notion of uncertainty. In this paper, we address this lack of uncertainty by proposing a deep ensemble approach where a collection of DNNs are trained independently. A measure of uncertainty in the relevance scores is computed by taking the standard deviation across the relevance scores produced by each model in the ensemble, which in turn is used to make the explanations more reliable. The class activation mapping method is used to assign a relevance score for each time step in the time series. Results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble is more accurate in locating relevant time steps and is more consistent across random initializations, thus making the model more trustworthy. The proposed methodology paves the way for constructing trustworthy and dependable support systems for processing clinical time series for healthcare related tasks.

A novel functional estimator for Rényi's α -entropy and its multivariate extension was recently proposed in terms of the normalized eigenspectrum of a Hermitian matrix of the projected data in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, the utility and possible applications of these new estimators are rather new and mostly unknown to practitioners. In this brief, we first show that this estimator enables straightforward measurement of information flow in realistic convolutional neural networks (CNNs) without any approximation. Then, we introduce the partial information decomposition (PID) framework and develop three quantities to analyze the synergy and redundancy in convolutional layer representations. Our results validate two fundamental data processing inequalities and reveal more inner properties concerning CNN training.

Colorectal polyps are known to be potential precursors to colorectal cancer, which is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths on a global scale. Early detection and prevention of colorectal cancer is primarily enabled through manual screenings, where the intestines of a patient is visually examined. Such a procedure can be challenging and exhausting for the person performing the screening. This has resulted in numerous studies on designing automatic systems aimed at supporting physicians during the examination. Recently, such automatic systems have seen a significant improvement as a result of an increasing amount of publicly available colorectal imagery and advances in deep learning research for object image recognition. Specifically, decision support systems based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on both detection and segmentation of colorectal polyps. However, CNN-based models need to not only be precise in order to be helpful in a medical context. In addition, interpretability and uncertainty in predictions must be well understood. In this paper, we develop and evaluate recent advances in uncertainty estimation and model interpretability in the context of semantic segmentation of polyps from colonoscopy images. Furthermore, we propose a novel method for estimating the uncertainty associated with important features in the input and demonstrate how interpretability and uncertainty can be modeled in DSSs for semantic segmentation of colorectal polyps. Results indicate that deep models are utilizing the shape and edge information of polyps to make their prediction. Moreover, inaccurate predictions show a higher degree of uncertainty compared to precise predictions.