Influence-Directed Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks

Abstract: We study the problem of explaining a rich class of behavioral properties of deep neural networks. Distinctively, our influence-directed explanations approach this problem by peering inside the network to identify neurons with high influence on a quantity and distribution of interest, using an axiomatically-justified influence measure, and then providing an interpretation for the concepts these neurons represent. We evaluate our approach by demonstrating a number of its unique capabilities on convolutional neural networks trained on ImageNet. Our evaluation demonstrates that influence-directed explanations (1) identify influential concepts that generalize across instances, (2) can be used to extract the "essence" of what the network learned about a class, and (3) isolate individual features the network uses to make decisions and distinguish related classes.