Can Multitask Learning Enhance Model Explainability?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Najjar, Hiba, Alshbib, Bushra, Dengel, Andreas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Najjar, Hiba
Alshbib, Bushra
Dengel, Andreas
author_facet Najjar, Hiba
Alshbib, Bushra
Dengel, Andreas
contents Remote sensing provides satellite data in diverse types and formats. The usage of multimodal learning networks exploits this diversity to improve model performance, except that the complexity of such networks comes at the expense of their interpretability. In this study, we explore how modalities can be leveraged through multitask learning to intrinsically explain model behavior. In particular, instead of additional inputs, we use certain modalities as additional targets to be predicted along with the main task. The success of this approach relies on the rich information content of satellite data, which remains as input modalities. We show how this modeling context provides numerous benefits: (1) in case of data scarcity, the additional modalities do not need to be collected for model inference at deployment, (2) the model performance remains comparable to the multimodal baseline performance, and in some cases achieves better scores, (3) prediction errors in the main task can be explained via the model behavior in the auxiliary task(s). We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on three datasets, including segmentation, classification, and regression tasks. Code available at git.opendfki.de/hiba.najjar/mtl_explainability/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06966
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Multitask Learning Enhance Model Explainability?
Najjar, Hiba
Alshbib, Bushra
Dengel, Andreas
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Remote sensing provides satellite data in diverse types and formats. The usage of multimodal learning networks exploits this diversity to improve model performance, except that the complexity of such networks comes at the expense of their interpretability. In this study, we explore how modalities can be leveraged through multitask learning to intrinsically explain model behavior. In particular, instead of additional inputs, we use certain modalities as additional targets to be predicted along with the main task. The success of this approach relies on the rich information content of satellite data, which remains as input modalities. We show how this modeling context provides numerous benefits: (1) in case of data scarcity, the additional modalities do not need to be collected for model inference at deployment, (2) the model performance remains comparable to the multimodal baseline performance, and in some cases achieves better scores, (3) prediction errors in the main task can be explained via the model behavior in the auxiliary task(s). We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on three datasets, including segmentation, classification, and regression tasks. Code available at git.opendfki.de/hiba.najjar/mtl_explainability/.
title Can Multitask Learning Enhance Model Explainability?
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06966