On The Coherence of Quantitative Evaluation of Visual Explanations
This work highlights a critical issue for researchers and practitioners in interpretable AI, as it reveals that current evaluation methods may not reliably assess explanation quality, potentially hindering progress in the field.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent evaluation of visual explanation methods for neural networks, finding that different evaluation metrics produce incoherent rankings and that explanation characteristics like sparsity significantly affect performance.
Recent years have shown an increased development of methods for justifying the predictions of neural networks through visual explanations. These explanations usually take the form of heatmaps which assign a saliency (or relevance) value to each pixel of the input image that expresses how relevant the pixel is for the prediction of a label. Complementing this development, evaluation methods have been proposed to assess the "goodness" of such explanations. On the one hand, some of these methods rely on synthetic datasets. However, this introduces the weakness of having limited guarantees regarding their applicability on more realistic settings. On the other hand, some methods rely on metrics for objective evaluation. However the level to which some of these evaluation methods perform with respect to each other is uncertain. Taking this into account, we conduct a comprehensive study on a subset of the ImageNet-1k validation set where we evaluate a number of different commonly-used explanation methods following a set of evaluation methods. We complement our study with sanity checks on the studied evaluation methods as a means to investigate their reliability and the impact of characteristics of the explanations on the evaluation methods. Results of our study suggest that there is a lack of coherency on the grading provided by some of the considered evaluation methods. Moreover, we have identified some characteristics of the explanations, e.g. sparsity, which can have a significant effect on the performance.