English

Look at the Variance! Efficient Black-box Explanations with Sobol-based Sensitivity Analysis

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022-02-17 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

We describe a novel attribution method which is grounded in Sensitivity Analysis and uses Sobol indices. Beyond modeling the individual contributions of image regions, Sobol indices provide an efficient way to capture higher-order interactions between image regions and their contributions to a neural network's prediction through the lens of variance. We describe an approach that makes the computation of these indices efficient for high-dimensional problems by using perturbation masks coupled with efficient estimators to handle the high dimensionality of images. Importantly, we show that the proposed method leads to favorable scores on standard benchmarks for vision (and language models) while drastically reducing the computing time compared to other black-box methods -- even surpassing the accuracy of state-of-the-art white-box methods which require access to internal representations. Our code is freely available: https://github.com/fel-thomas/Sobol-Attribution-Method

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.04138,
  title  = {Look at the Variance! Efficient Black-box Explanations with Sobol-based Sensitivity Analysis},
  author = {Thomas Fel and Remi Cadene and Mathieu Chalvidal and Matthieu Cord and David Vigouroux and Thomas Serre},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.04138},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

NeurIPS2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:29:34.313Z