Explainable AI (XAI) has gained significant attention for providing insights into the decision-making processes of deep learning models, particularly for image classification tasks through saliency-based visual explanations. Despite their success, key challenges persist due to the scarcity of annotated datasets and the absence of standardized evaluation protocols. In this paper, we introduce Saliency-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate visual explanations generated by saliency methods across multiple datasets. We curated, constructed, and annotated eight datasets, each covering diverse tasks such as scene classification, cancer diagnosis, object classification, and action classification, with corresponding ground-truth explanation annotations. The benchmark includes a standardized and unified evaluation pipeline for assessing faithfulness and alignment of the visual explanation, providing a holistic visual explanation performance assessment. We benchmark these eight datasets with widely used saliency methods on different image classifier architectures to evaluate explanation quality. Additionally, we developed an user-friendly toolkit for automating the evaluation pipeline, from data accessing, and data loading, to result evaluation. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/XAIdataset/XAIdataset.github.io.

Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are graphs of connected textual documents. Graph models can efficiently learn TAGs, but their training heavily relies on human-annotated labels, which are scarce or even unavailable in many applications. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in few-shot and zero-shot TAG learning, but they suffer from scalability, cost, and privacy issues. Therefore, in this work, we focus on synergizing LLMs and graph models with their complementary strengths by distilling the power of LLMs into a local graph model on TAG learning. To address the inherent gaps between LLMs (generative models for texts) and graph models (discriminative models for graphs), we propose first to let LLMs teach an interpreter with rich rationale and then let a student model mimic the interpreter's reasoning without LLMs' rationale. We convert LLM's textual rationales to multi-level graph rationales to train the interpreter model and align the student model with the interpreter model based on the features of TAGs. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our proposed framework.

Explanation supervision aims to enhance deep learning models by integrating additional signals to guide the generation of model explanations, showcasing notable improvements in both the predictability and explainability of the model. However, the application of explanation supervision to higher-dimensional data, such as 3D medical images, remains an under-explored domain. Challenges associated with supervising visual explanations in the presence of an additional dimension include: 1) spatial correlation changed, 2) lack of direct 3D annotations, and 3) uncertainty varies across different parts of the explanation. To address these challenges, we propose a Dynamic Uncertainty-aware Explanation supervision (DUE) framework for 3D explanation supervision that ensures uncertainty-aware explanation guidance when dealing with sparsely annotated 3D data with diffusion-based 3D interpolation. Our proposed framework is validated through comprehensive experiments on diverse real-world medical imaging datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing the predictability and explainability of deep learning models in the context of medical imaging diagnosis applications.

Explanation supervision is a technique that guides a deep learning model to have correct attention during training and thus improve both the interpretability and predictability of the model. However, the exploration of explanation supervision methods for spatiotemporal prediction has been limited. In this paper, we propose a framework for explanation-supervised spatiotemporal forecasting which aims to explicitly incorporate human-annotated spatiotemporal explanations as supervision signals, achieved by introducing a unique objective that integrates human explanations for general spa-tiotemporal predictive models. Specifically, to extend the explanation supervision technique to spatiotemporal prediction, our framework addresses several inherent challenges associated with spatiotemporal data. Firstly, it tackles the difficulty of identifying and correcting the spatiotemporal reasoning process. Secondly, it addresses the challenge of handling the absence of human explanation annotation through interpolation techniques. Lastly, it handles the varying influence of different time points. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on two real-world spatiotemporal datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our methods in improving the interpretability of explanations and the performance of the backbone deep neural network models, surpassing existing state-of-the-art explanation supervision methods.

Explanation supervision is a technique in which the model is guided by human-generated explanations during training. This technique aims to improve both the interpretability and predictability of the model by incorporating human understanding into the training process. Since explanation supervision requires a large scale of training data, the data augmentation technique is necessary to be applied to increase the size and diversity of the original dataset. However, data augmentation on sophisticated data like medical images is particularly challenging due to the following: 1) scarcity of data in training the learning-based data augmenter, 2) difficulty in generating realistic and sophisticated images, and 3) difficulty in ensuring the augmented data indeed boosts the performance of explanation-guided learning. To solve these challenges, we propose an Explanation Iterative Supervision via Saliency-guided Data Augmentation (ESSA) framework for conducting explanation supervision and adversarial-trained image data augmentation via a synergized iterative loop that handles the translation from annotation to sophisticated images and the generation of synthetic image-annotation pairs with an alternating training strategy. Extensive experiments on two datasets from the medical imaging domain demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in improving both the predictability and explainability of the model.