Less is More: The Influence of Pruning on the Explainability of CNNs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Merkle, Florian, Weber, David, Schöttle, Pascal, Schlögl, Stephan, Nocker, Martin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Merkle, Florian
Weber, David
Schöttle, Pascal
Schlögl, Stephan
Nocker, Martin
author_facet Merkle, Florian
Weber, David
Schöttle, Pascal
Schlögl, Stephan
Nocker, Martin
contents Over the last century, deep learning models have become the state-of-the-art for solving complex computer vision problems. These modern computer vision models have millions of parameters, which presents two major challenges: (1) the increased computational requirements hamper the deployment in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile or IoT devices, and (2) explaining the complex decisions of such networks to humans is challenging. Network pruning is a technical approach to reduce the complexity of models, where less important parameters are removed. The work presented in this paper investigates whether this reduction in technical complexity also helps with perceived explainability. To do so, we conducted a pre-study and two human-grounded experiments, assessing the effects of different pruning ratios on explainability. Overall, we evaluate four different compression rates (i.e., 2, 4, 8, and 32) with 37 500 tasks on Mechanical Turk. Results indicate that lower compression rates have a positive influence on explainability, while higher compression rates show negative effects. Furthermore, we were able to identify sweet spots that increase both the perceived explainability and the model's performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_08878
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Less is More: The Influence of Pruning on the Explainability of CNNs
Merkle, Florian
Weber, David
Schöttle, Pascal
Schlögl, Stephan
Nocker, Martin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Over the last century, deep learning models have become the state-of-the-art for solving complex computer vision problems. These modern computer vision models have millions of parameters, which presents two major challenges: (1) the increased computational requirements hamper the deployment in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile or IoT devices, and (2) explaining the complex decisions of such networks to humans is challenging. Network pruning is a technical approach to reduce the complexity of models, where less important parameters are removed. The work presented in this paper investigates whether this reduction in technical complexity also helps with perceived explainability. To do so, we conducted a pre-study and two human-grounded experiments, assessing the effects of different pruning ratios on explainability. Overall, we evaluate four different compression rates (i.e., 2, 4, 8, and 32) with 37 500 tasks on Mechanical Turk. Results indicate that lower compression rates have a positive influence on explainability, while higher compression rates show negative effects. Furthermore, we were able to identify sweet spots that increase both the perceived explainability and the model's performance.
title Less is More: The Influence of Pruning on the Explainability of CNNs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08878