Human-aligned Deep Learning: Explainability, Causality, and Biological Inspiration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Carloni, Gianluca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Carloni, Gianluca
author_facet Carloni, Gianluca
contents This work aligns deep learning (DL) with human reasoning capabilities and needs to enable more efficient, interpretable, and robust image classification. We approach this from three perspectives: explainability, causality, and biological vision. Introduction and background open this work before diving into operative chapters. First, we assess neural networks' visualization techniques for medical images and validate an explainable-by-design method for breast mass classification. A comprehensive review at the intersection of XAI and causality follows, where we introduce a general scaffold to organize past and future research, laying the groundwork for our second perspective. In the causality direction, we propose novel modules that exploit feature co-occurrence in medical images, leading to more effective and explainable predictions. We further introduce CROCODILE, a general framework that integrates causal concepts, contrastive learning, feature disentanglement, and prior knowledge to enhance generalization. Lastly, we explore biological vision, examining how humans recognize objects, and propose CoCoReco, a connectivity-inspired network with context-aware attention mechanisms. Overall, our key findings include: (i) simple activation maximization lacks insight for medical imaging DL models; (ii) prototypical-part learning is effective and radiologically aligned; (iii) XAI and causal ML are deeply connected; (iv) weak causal signals can be leveraged without a priori information to improve performance and interpretability; (v) our framework generalizes across medical domains and out-of-distribution data; (vi) incorporating biological circuit motifs improves human-aligned recognition. This work contributes toward human-aligned DL and highlights pathways to bridge the gap between research and clinical adoption, with implications for improved trust, diagnostic accuracy, and safe deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_13717
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-aligned Deep Learning: Explainability, Causality, and Biological Inspiration
Carloni, Gianluca
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Neurons and Cognition
I.2; I.2.6; I.4; I.4.7; I.5; J.3; J.6
This work aligns deep learning (DL) with human reasoning capabilities and needs to enable more efficient, interpretable, and robust image classification. We approach this from three perspectives: explainability, causality, and biological vision. Introduction and background open this work before diving into operative chapters. First, we assess neural networks' visualization techniques for medical images and validate an explainable-by-design method for breast mass classification. A comprehensive review at the intersection of XAI and causality follows, where we introduce a general scaffold to organize past and future research, laying the groundwork for our second perspective. In the causality direction, we propose novel modules that exploit feature co-occurrence in medical images, leading to more effective and explainable predictions. We further introduce CROCODILE, a general framework that integrates causal concepts, contrastive learning, feature disentanglement, and prior knowledge to enhance generalization. Lastly, we explore biological vision, examining how humans recognize objects, and propose CoCoReco, a connectivity-inspired network with context-aware attention mechanisms. Overall, our key findings include: (i) simple activation maximization lacks insight for medical imaging DL models; (ii) prototypical-part learning is effective and radiologically aligned; (iii) XAI and causal ML are deeply connected; (iv) weak causal signals can be leveraged without a priori information to improve performance and interpretability; (v) our framework generalizes across medical domains and out-of-distribution data; (vi) incorporating biological circuit motifs improves human-aligned recognition. This work contributes toward human-aligned DL and highlights pathways to bridge the gap between research and clinical adoption, with implications for improved trust, diagnostic accuracy, and safe deployment.
title Human-aligned Deep Learning: Explainability, Causality, and Biological Inspiration
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Neurons and Cognition
I.2; I.2.6; I.4; I.4.7; I.5; J.3; J.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13717