Sparse Explanations of Neural Networks Using Pruned Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation

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Main Authors: Sarmiento, Paulo Yanez, Witzke, Simon, Klein, Nadja, Renard, Bernhard Y.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Sarmiento, Paulo Yanez
Witzke, Simon
Klein, Nadja
Renard, Bernhard Y.
author_facet Sarmiento, Paulo Yanez
Witzke, Simon
Klein, Nadja
Renard, Bernhard Y.
contents Explainability is a key component in many applications involving deep neural networks (DNNs). However, current explanation methods for DNNs commonly leave it to the human observer to distinguish relevant explanations from spurious noise. This is not feasible anymore when going from easily human-accessible data such as images to more complex data such as genome sequences. To facilitate the accessibility of DNN outputs from such complex data and to increase explainability, we present a modification of the widely used explanation method layer-wise relevance propagation. Our approach enforces sparsity directly by pruning the relevance propagation for the different layers. Thereby, we achieve sparser relevance attributions for the input features as well as for the intermediate layers. As the relevance propagation is input-specific, we aim to prune the relevance propagation rather than the underlying model architecture. This allows to prune different neurons for different inputs and hence, might be more appropriate to the local nature of explanation methods. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we evaluate it on two types of data: images and genome sequences. We show that our modification indeed leads to noise reduction and concentrates relevance on the most important features compared to the baseline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_14271
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparse Explanations of Neural Networks Using Pruned Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation
Sarmiento, Paulo Yanez
Witzke, Simon
Klein, Nadja
Renard, Bernhard Y.
Machine Learning
Explainability is a key component in many applications involving deep neural networks (DNNs). However, current explanation methods for DNNs commonly leave it to the human observer to distinguish relevant explanations from spurious noise. This is not feasible anymore when going from easily human-accessible data such as images to more complex data such as genome sequences. To facilitate the accessibility of DNN outputs from such complex data and to increase explainability, we present a modification of the widely used explanation method layer-wise relevance propagation. Our approach enforces sparsity directly by pruning the relevance propagation for the different layers. Thereby, we achieve sparser relevance attributions for the input features as well as for the intermediate layers. As the relevance propagation is input-specific, we aim to prune the relevance propagation rather than the underlying model architecture. This allows to prune different neurons for different inputs and hence, might be more appropriate to the local nature of explanation methods. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we evaluate it on two types of data: images and genome sequences. We show that our modification indeed leads to noise reduction and concentrates relevance on the most important features compared to the baseline.
title Sparse Explanations of Neural Networks Using Pruned Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14271