English

Causality for Inherently Explainable Transformers: CAT-XPLAIN

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022-07-01 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

There have been several post-hoc explanation approaches developed to explain pre-trained black-box neural networks. However, there is still a gap in research efforts toward designing neural networks that are inherently explainable. In this paper, we utilize a recently proposed instance-wise post-hoc causal explanation method to make an existing transformer architecture inherently explainable. Once trained, our model provides an explanation in the form of top-kk regions in the input space of the given instance contributing to its decision. We evaluate our method on binary classification tasks using three image datasets: MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR. Our results demonstrate that compared to the causality-based post-hoc explainer model, our inherently explainable model achieves better explainability results while eliminating the need of training a separate explainer model. Our code is available at https://github.com/mvrl/CAT-XPLAIN.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.14841,
  title  = {Causality for Inherently Explainable Transformers: CAT-XPLAIN},
  author = {Subash Khanal and Benjamin Brodie and Xin Xing and Ai-Ling Lin and Nathan Jacobs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.14841},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted for spotlight presentation at the Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Computer Vision Workshop at CVPR 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T12:08:46.606Z