Remote screening of respiratory diseases has been widely studied as a non-invasive and early instrument for diagnosis purposes, especially in the pandemic. The respiratory sound classification task has been realized with numerous deep neural network (DNN) models due to their superior performance. However, in the high-stake medical domain where decisions can have significant consequences, it is desirable to develop interpretable models; thus, providing understandable reasons for physicians and patients. To address the issue, we propose a prototype learning framework, that jointly generates exemplar samples for explanation and integrates these samples into a layer of DNNs. The experimental results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on the largest public respiratory sound database.
The number of information systems (IS) studies dealing with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is currently exploding as the field demands more transparency about the internal decision logic of machine learning (ML) models. However, most techniques subsumed under XAI provide post-hoc-analytical explanations, which have to be considered with caution as they only use approximations of the underlying ML model. Therefore, our paper investigates a series of intrinsically interpretable ML models and discusses their suitability for the IS community. More specifically, our focus is on advanced extensions of generalized additive models (GAM) in which predictors are modeled independently in a non-linear way to generate shape functions that can capture arbitrary patterns but remain fully interpretable. In our study, we evaluate the prediction qualities of five GAMs as compared to six traditional ML models and assess their visual outputs for model interpretability. On this basis, we investigate their merits and limitations and derive design implications for further improvements.
With the recent increase in intelligent CCTVs for visual surveillance, a new image degradation that integrates resolution conversion and synthetic rain models is required. For example, in heavy rain, face images captured by CCTV from a distance have significant deterioration in both visibility and resolution. Unlike traditional image degradation models (IDM), such as rain removal and superresolution, this study addresses a new IDM referred to as a scale-aware heavy rain model and proposes a method for restoring high-resolution face images (HR-FIs) from low-resolution heavy rain face images (LRHR-FI). To this end, a 2-stage network is presented. The first stage generates low-resolution face images (LR-FIs), from which heavy rain has been removed from the LRHR-FIs to improve visibility. To realize this, an interpretable IDM-based network is constructed to predict physical parameters, such as rain streaks, transmission maps, and atmospheric light. In addition, the image reconstruction loss is evaluated to enhance the estimates of the physical parameters. For the second stage, which aims to reconstruct the HR-FIs from the LR-FIs outputted in the first stage, facial component guided adversarial learning (FCGAL) is applied to boost facial structure expressions. To focus on informative facial features and reinforce the authenticity of facial components, such as the eyes and nose, a face-parsing-guided generator and facial local discriminators are designed for FCGAL. The experimental results verify that the proposed approach based on physical-based network design and FCGAL can remove heavy rain and increase the resolution and visibility simultaneously. Moreover, the proposed heavy-rain face image restoration outperforms state-of-the-art models of heavy rain removal, image-to-image translation, and superresolution.
In the context of personalized federated learning (FL), the critical challenge is to balance local model improvement and global model tuning when the personal and global objectives may not be exactly aligned. Inspired by Bayesian hierarchical models, we develop a self-aware personalized FL method where each client can automatically balance the training of its local personal model and the global model that implicitly contributes to other clients' training. Such a balance is derived from the inter-client and intra-client uncertainty quantification. A larger inter-client variation implies more personalization is needed. Correspondingly, our method uses uncertainty-driven local training steps and aggregation rule instead of conventional local fine-tuning and sample size-based aggregation. With experimental studies on synthetic data, Amazon Alexa audio data, and public datasets such as MNIST, FEMNIST, CIFAR10, and Sent140, we show that our proposed method can achieve significantly improved personalization performance compared with the existing counterparts.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
This paper proposes a generic method to learn interpretable convolutional filters in a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification, where each interpretable filter encodes features of a specific object part. Our method does not require additional annotations of object parts or textures for supervision. Instead, we use the same training data as traditional CNNs. Our method automatically assigns each interpretable filter in a high conv-layer with an object part of a certain category during the learning process. Such explicit knowledge representations in conv-layers of CNN help people clarify the logic encoded in the CNN, i.e., answering what patterns the CNN extracts from an input image and uses for prediction. We have tested our method using different benchmark CNNs with various structures to demonstrate the broad applicability of our method. Experiments have shown that our interpretable filters are much more semantically meaningful than traditional filters.
Machine-learning models have demonstrated great success in learning complex patterns that enable them to make predictions about unobserved data. In addition to using models for prediction, the ability to interpret what a model has learned is receiving an increasing amount of attention. However, this increased focus has led to considerable confusion about the notion of interpretability. In particular, it is unclear how the wide array of proposed interpretation methods are related, and what common concepts can be used to evaluate them. We aim to address these concerns by defining interpretability in the context of machine learning and introducing the Predictive, Descriptive, Relevant (PDR) framework for discussing interpretations. The PDR framework provides three overarching desiderata for evaluation: predictive accuracy, descriptive accuracy and relevancy, with relevancy judged relative to a human audience. Moreover, to help manage the deluge of interpretation methods, we introduce a categorization of existing techniques into model-based and post-hoc categories, with sub-groups including sparsity, modularity and simulatability. To demonstrate how practitioners can use the PDR framework to evaluate and understand interpretations, we provide numerous real-world examples. These examples highlight the often under-appreciated role played by human audiences in discussions of interpretability. Finally, based on our framework, we discuss limitations of existing methods and directions for future work. We hope that this work will provide a common vocabulary that will make it easier for both practitioners and researchers to discuss and choose from the full range of interpretation methods.
In structure learning, the output is generally a structure that is used as supervision information to achieve good performance. Considering the interpretation of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years, it will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that Finite State Automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data has more interpretable inner mechanism and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. We first give the graphical illustration of FSA for human beings to follow, which shows the interpretability. From the FSA's point of view, we then analyze how the performance of RNNs are affected by the number of gates, as well as the semantic meaning behind the transition of numerical hidden states. Our results suggest that RNNs with simple gated structure such as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU) is more desirable and the transitions in FSA leading to specific classification result are associated with corresponding words which are understandable by human beings.
This paper reviews recent studies in understanding neural-network representations and learning neural networks with interpretable/disentangled middle-layer representations. Although deep neural networks have exhibited superior performance in various tasks, the interpretability is always the Achilles' heel of deep neural networks. At present, deep neural networks obtain high discrimination power at the cost of low interpretability of their black-box representations. We believe that high model interpretability may help people to break several bottlenecks of deep learning, e.g., learning from very few annotations, learning via human-computer communications at the semantic level, and semantically debugging network representations. We focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and we revisit the visualization of CNN representations, methods of diagnosing representations of pre-trained CNNs, approaches for disentangling pre-trained CNN representations, learning of CNNs with disentangled representations, and middle-to-end learning based on model interpretability. Finally, we discuss prospective trends in explainable artificial intelligence.