Believe The HiPe: Hierarchical Perturbation for Fast, Robust, and Model-Agnostic Saliency Mapping
This addresses the need for efficient and flexible interpretability tools in high-stakes AI applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing model-agnostic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of slow and architecturally constrained saliency mapping for interpreting AI predictions by proposing Hierarchical Perturbation, a fast and model-agnostic method that produces robust saliency maps with competitive or superior quality and over 20 times faster computation.
Understanding the predictions made by Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems is becoming more and more important as deep learning models are used for increasingly complex and high-stakes tasks. Saliency mapping -- a popular visual attribution method -- is one important tool for this, but existing formulations are limited by either computational cost or architectural constraints. We therefore propose Hierarchical Perturbation, a very fast and completely model-agnostic method for interpreting model predictions with robust saliency maps. Using standard benchmarks and datasets, we show that our saliency maps are of competitive or superior quality to those generated by existing model-agnostic methods -- and are over 20 times faster to compute.