Foiling Explanations in Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have greatly impacted numerous fields over the past decade. Yet despite exhibiting superb performance over many problems, their black-box nature still poses a significant challenge with respect to explainability. Indeed, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is crucial in several fields, wherein the answer alone -- sans a reasoning of how said answer was derived -- is of little value. This paper uncovers a troubling property of explanation methods for image-based DNNs: by making small visual changes to the input image -- hardly influencing the network's output -- we demonstrate how explanations may be arbitrarily manipulated through the use of evolution strategies. Our novel algorithm, AttaXAI, a model-agnostic, adversarial attack on XAI algorithms, only requires access to the output logits of a classifier and to the explanation map; these weak assumptions render our approach highly useful where real-world models and data are concerned. We compare our method's performance on two benchmark datasets -- CIFAR100 and ImageNet -- using four different pretrained deep-learning models: VGG16-CIFAR100, VGG16-ImageNet, MobileNet-CIFAR100, and Inception-v3-ImageNet. We find that the XAI methods can be manipulated without the use of gradients or other model internals. Our novel algorithm is successfully able to manipulate an image in a manner imperceptible to the human eye, such that the XAI method outputs a specific explanation map. To our knowledge, this is the first such method in a black-box setting, and we believe it has significant value where explainability is desired, required, or legally mandatory.