Black-box deep learning approaches have showcased significant potential in the realm of medical image analysis. However, the stringent trustworthiness requirements intrinsic to the medical field have catalyzed research into the utilization of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), with a particular focus on concept-based methods. Existing concept-based methods predominantly apply concept annotations from a single perspective (e.g., global level), neglecting the nuanced semantic relationships between sub-regions and concepts embedded within medical images. This leads to underutilization of the valuable medical information and may cause models to fall short in harmoniously balancing interpretability and performance when employing inherently interpretable architectures such as Concept Bottlenecks. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose a multi-modal explainable disease diagnosis framework that meticulously aligns medical images and clinical-related concepts semantically at multiple strata, encompassing the image level, token level, and concept level. Moreover, our method allows for model intervention and offers both textual and visual explanations in terms of human-interpretable concepts. Experimental results on three skin image datasets demonstrate that our method, while preserving model interpretability, attains high performance and label efficiency for concept detection and disease diagnosis. The code is available at https://github.com/Tommy-Bie/MICA.
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Large language models contain noisy general knowledge of the world, yet are hard to train or fine-tune. In contrast cognitive architectures have excellent interpretability and are flexible to update but require a lot of manual work to instantiate. In this work, we combine the best of both worlds: bootstrapping a cognitive-based model with the noisy knowledge encoded in large language models. Through an embodied agent doing kitchen tasks, we show that our proposed framework yields better efficiency compared to an agent entirely based on large language models. Our experiments also indicate that the cognitive agent bootstrapped using this framework can generalize to novel environments and be scaled to complex tasks.
Cognitive Diagnosis Modeling aims to infer students' proficiency level on knowledge concepts from their response logs. Existing methods typically model students’ response processes as the interaction between students and exercises or concepts based on hand-crafted or deeply-learned interaction functions. Despite their promising achievements, they fail to consider the relationship between students' cognitive states and affective states in learning, e.g., the feelings of frustration, boredom, or confusion with the learning content, which is insufficient for comprehensive cognitive diagnosis in intelligent education. To fill the research gap, we propose a novel Affect-aware Cognitive Diagnosis (ACD) model which can effectively diagnose the knowledge proficiency levels of students by taking into consideration the affective factors. Specifically, we first design a student affect perception module under the assumption that the affective state is jointly influenced by the student's affect trait and the difficulty of the exercise. Then, our inferred affective distribution is further used to estimate the student's subjective factors, i.e., guessing and slipping, respectively. Finally, we integrate the estimated guessing and slipping parameters with the basic neural cognitive diagnosis framework based on the DINA model, which facilitates the modeling of complex exercising interactions in a more accurate and interpretable fashion. Besides, we also extend our affect perception module in an unsupervised learning setting based on contrastive learning, thus significantly improving the compatibility of our ACD. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to unify the cognition modeling and affect modeling into the same framework for student cognitive diagnosis. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our ACD. Our code is available at https://github.com/zeng-zhen/ACD.
A Brain-Inspired Way of Reducing the Network Complexity via Concept-Regularized Coding for Emotion Recognition
PDF ↗The human brain can effortlessly and reliably perceive emotions, whereas existing facial emotion recognition (FER) methods suffer from drawbacks such as complex model structures, high storage requirements, and poor interpretability. Inspired by the role of emotion concepts in visual perception coding within the human brain, we propose a dual-pathway framework emulating the neural computation of emotion recognition. Specifically, these two pathways are designed to model the representation of emotion concepts in the brain and the visual perception process, respectively. For the former, we adopt a disentangled approach to extract emotion concepts from complex facial geometric attributes; for the latter, we employ an emotional confidence evaluation strategy to determine which concept is optimal for regularizing the perceptual coding. The proposed concept-regularized coding strategy endows the framework with flexibility and interpretability as well as good performances on several benchmarking FER datasets.
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in image generation task where users can create visually astonishing images with high-quality. However exsiting text-to-image diffusion models are proficient in generating concrete concepts (dogs) but encounter challenges with more abstract ones (emotions). Several efforts have been made to modify image emotions with color and style adjustments facing limitations in effectively conveying emotions with fixed image contents. In this work we introduce Emotional Image Content Generation (EIGC) a new task to generate semantic-clear and emotion-faithful images given emotion categories. Specifically we propose an emotion space and construct a mapping network to align it with powerful Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) space providing a concrete interpretation of abstract emotions. Attribute loss and emotion confidence are further proposed to ensure the semantic diversity and emotion fidelity of the generated images. Our method outperforms the state-the-art text-to-image approaches both quantitatively and qualitatively where we derive three custom metrics i.e.emotion accuracy semantic clarity and semantic diversity. In addition to generation our method can help emotion understanding and inspire emotional art design. Project page: https://vcc.tech/research/2024/EmoGen.
The rapid increase in cases of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in recent years has raised significant public concern. Accurately identifying tissue alteration regions is crucial for the diagnosis of NAFLD but this task presents challenges in pathology image analysis particularly with small-scale datasets. Recently the paradigm shift from full fine-tuning to prompting in adapting vision foundation models has offered a new perspective for small-scale data analysis. However existing prompting methods based on task-agnostic prompts are mainly developed for generic image recognition which fall short in providing instructive cues for complex pathology images. In this paper we propose Q uantitative A ttribute-based P rompting (QAP) a novel prompting method specifically for liver pathology image analysis. QAP is based on two quantitative attributes namely K-function-based spatial attributes and histogram-based morphological attributes which are aimed for quantitative assessment of tissue states. Moreover a conditional prompt generator is designed to turn these instance-specific attributes into visual prompts. Extensive experiments on three diverse tasks demonstrate that our task-specific prompting method achieves better diagnostic performance as well as better interpretability. Code is available at \href https://github.com/7LFB/QAP https://github.com/7LFB/QAP .
We investigate a fundamental aspect of machine vision: the measurement of features by revisiting clustering one of the most classic approaches in machine learning and data analysis. Existing visual feature extractors including ConvNets ViTs and MLPs represent an image as rectangular regions. Though prevalent such a grid-style paradigm is built upon engineering practice and lacks explicit modeling of data distribution. In this work we propose feature extraction with clustering (FEC) a conceptually elegant yet surprisingly ad-hoc interpretable neural clustering framework which views feature extraction as a process of selecting representatives from data and thus automatically captures the underlying data distribution. Given an image FEC alternates between grouping pixels into individual clusters to abstract representatives and updating the deep features of pixels with current representatives. Such an iterative working mechanism is implemented in the form of several neural layers and the final representatives can be used for downstream tasks. The cluster assignments across layers which can be viewed and inspected by humans make the forward process of FEC fully transparent and empower it with promising ad-hoc interpretability. Extensive experiments on various visual recognition models and tasks verify the effectiveness generality and interpretability of FEC. We expect this work will provoke a rethink of the current de facto grid-style paradigm.
Modeling Dense Multimodal Interactions Between Biological Pathways and Histology for Survival Prediction
PDF ↗Integrating whole-slide images (WSIs) and bulk transcriptomics for predicting patient survival can improve our understanding of patient prognosis. However this multimodal task is particularly challenging due to the different nature of these data: WSIs represent a very high-dimensional spatial description of a tumor while bulk transcriptomics represent a global description of gene expression levels within that tumor. In this context our work aims to address two key challenges: (1) how can we tokenize transcriptomics in a semantically meaningful and interpretable way? and (2) how can we capture dense multimodal interactions between these two modalities? Here we propose to learn biological pathway tokens from transcriptomics that can encode specific cellular functions. Together with histology patch tokens that encode the slide morphology we argue that they form appropriate reasoning units for interpretability. We fuse both modalities using a memory-efficient multimodal Transformer that can model interactions between pathway and histology patch tokens. Our model SURVPATH achieves state-of-the-art performance when evaluated against unimodal and multimodal baselines on five datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Our interpretability framework identifies key multimodal prognostic factors and as such can provide valuable insights into the interaction between genotype and phenotype. Code available at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/SurvPath.
We demonstrate text as a strong cross-modal interface. Rather than relying on deep embeddings to connect image and language as the interface representation our approach represents an image as text from which we enjoy the interpretability and flexibility inherent to natural language. We employ an autoencoder that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for decoding. The encoder is trained to transform an input image into text which is then fed into the fixed text-to-image diffusion decoder to reconstruct the original input a process we term De-Diffusion. Experiments validate both the precision and comprehensiveness of De-Diffusion text representing images such that it can be readily ingested by off-the-shelf text-to-image tools and LLMs for diverse multi-modal tasks. For example a single De-Diffusion model can generalize to provide transferable prompts for different text-to-image tools and also achieves a new state of the art on open-ended vision-language tasks by simply prompting large language models with few-shot examples. Project page: https://dediffusion.github.io/
We present a new additive image factorization technique that treats images to be composed of multiple latent specular components which can be simply estimated recursively by modulating the sparsity during decomposition. Our model-driven RSFNet estimates these factors by unrolling the optimization into network layers requiring only a few scalars to be learned. The resultant factors are interpretable by design and can be fused for different image enhancement tasks via a network or combined directly by the user in a controllable fashion. Based on RSFNet we detail a zero-reference Low Light Enhancement (LLE) application trained without paired or unpaired supervision. Our system improves the state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks and achieves better generalization on multiple other datasets. We also integrate our factors with other task specific fusion networks for applications like deraining deblurring and dehazing with negligible overhead thereby highlighting the multi-domain and multi-task generalizability of our proposed RSFNet. The code and data is released for reproducibility on the project homepage.
Canonical emotions such as happy sad and fear are easy to understand and annotate. However emotions are often compound e.g. happily surprised and can be mapped to the action units (AUs) used for expressing emotions and trivially to the canonical ones. Intuitively emotions are continuous as represented by the arousal-valence (AV) model. An interpretable unification of these four modalities --namely Canonical Compound AUs and AV-- is highly desirable for a better representation and understanding of emotions. However such unification remains to be unknown in the current literature. In this work we propose an interpretable and unified emotion model referred as C2A2. We also develop a method that leverages labels of the non-unified models to annotate the novel unified one. Finally we modify the text-conditional diffusion models to understand continuous numbers which are then used to generate continuous expressions using our unified emotion model. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments we show that our generated images are rich and capture subtle expressions. Our work allows a fine-grained generation of expressions in conjunction with other textual inputs and offers a new label space for emotions at the same time.
Learning from Observer Gaze: Zero-Shot Attention Prediction Oriented by Human-Object Interaction Recognition
PDF ↗Most existing attention prediction research focuses on salient instances like humans and objects. However the more complex interaction-oriented attention arising from the comprehension of interactions between instances by human observers remains largely unexplored. This is equally crucial for advancing human-machine interaction and human-centered artificial intelligence. To bridge this gap we first collect a novel gaze fixation dataset named IG comprising 530000 fixation points across 740 diverse interaction categories capturing visual attention during human observers' cognitive processes of interactions. Subsequently we introduce the zero-shot interaction-oriented attention prediction task (ZeroIA) which challenges models to predict visual cues for interactions not encountered during training. Thirdly we present the Interactive Attention model (IA) designed to emulate human observers' cognitive processes to tackle the ZeroIA problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IA outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in both ZeroIA and fully supervised settings. Lastly we endeavor to apply interaction-oriented attention to the interaction recognition task itself. Further experimental results demonstrate the promising potential to enhance the performance and interpretability of existing state-of-the-art HOI models by incorporating real human attention data from IG and attention labels generated by IA.
SatSynth: Augmenting Image-Mask Pairs through Diffusion Models for Aerial Semantic Segmentation
PDF ↗In recent years semantic segmentation has become a pivotal tool in processing and interpreting satellite imagery. Yet a prevalent limitation of supervised learning techniques remains the need for extensive manual annotations by experts. In this work we explore the potential of generative image diffusion to address the scarcity of annotated data in earth observation tasks. The main idea is to learn the joint data manifold of images and labels leveraging recent advancements in denoising diffusion probabilistic models. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to generate both images and corresponding masks for satellite segmentation. We find that the obtained pairs not only display high quality in fine-scale features but also ensure a wide sampling diversity. Both aspects are crucial for earth observation data where semantic classes can vary severely in scale and occurrence frequency. We employ the novel data instances for downstream segmentation as a form of data augmentation. In our experiments we provide comparisons to prior works based on discriminative diffusion models or GANs. We demonstrate that integrating generated samples yields significant quantitative improvements for satellite semantic segmentation -- both compared to baselines and when training only on the original data.
Neural fields have emerged as a powerful and broadly applicable method for representing signals. However in contrast to classical discrete digital signal processing the portfolio of tools to process such representations is still severely limited and restricted to Euclidean domains. In this paper we address this problem by showing how a probabilistic re-interpretation of neural fields can enable their training and inference processes to become "filter-aware". The formulation we propose not only merges training and filtering in an efficient way but also generalizes beyond the familiar Euclidean coordinate spaces to the more general set of smooth manifolds and convolutions induced by the actions of Lie groups. We demonstrate how this framework can enable novel integrations of signal processing techniques for neural field applications on both Euclidean domains such as images and audio as well as non-Euclidean domains such as rotations and rays. A noteworthy benefit of our method is its applicability. Our method can be summarized as primarily a modification of the loss function and in most cases does not require changes to the network architecture or the inference process.
SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagery
PDF ↗Prior studies on Remote Sensing Foundation Model (RSFM) reveal immense potential towards a generic model for Earth Observation. Nevertheless these works primarily focus on a single modality without temporal and geo-context modeling hampering their capabilities for diverse tasks. In this study we present SkySense a generic billion-scale model pre-trained on a curated multi-modal Remote Sensing Imagery (RSI) dataset with 21.5 million temporal sequences. SkySense incorporates a factorized multi-modal spatiotemporal encoder taking temporal sequences of optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data as input. This encoder is pre-trained by our proposed Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning to learn representations across different modal and spatial granularities. To further enhance the RSI representations by the geo-context clue we introduce Geo-Context Prototype Learning to learn region-aware prototypes upon RSI's multi-modal spatiotemporal features. To our best knowledge SkySense is the largest Multi-Modal RSFM to date whose modules can be flexibly combined or used individually to accommodate various tasks. It demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities on a thorough evaluation encompassing 16 datasets over 7 tasks from single- to multi-modal static to temporal and classification to localization. SkySense surpasses 18 recent RSFMs in all test scenarios. Specifically it outperforms the latest models such as GFM SatLas and Scale-MAE by a large margin i.e. 2.76% 3.67% and 3.61% on average respectively. We will release the pre-trained weights to facilitate future research and Earth Observation applications.
WWW: A Unified Framework for Explaining What Where and Why of Neural Networks by Interpretation of Neuron Concepts
PDF ↗Recent advancements in neural networks have showcased their remarkable capabilities across various domains. Despite these successes the "black box" problem still remains. To address this we propose a novel framework WWW that offers the 'what' 'where' and 'why' of the neural network decisions in human-understandable terms. Specifically WWW utilizes an adaptive selection for concept discovery employing adaptive cosine similarity and thresholding techniques to effectively explain 'what'. To address the 'where' and 'why' we proposed a novel combination of neuron activation maps (NAMs) with Shapley values generating localized concept maps and heatmaps for individual inputs. Furthermore WWW introduces a method for predicting uncertainty leveraging heatmap similarities to estimate the prediction's reliability. Experimental evaluations of WWW demonstrate superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative metrics outperforming existing methods in interpretability. WWW provides a unified solution for explaining 'what' 'where' and 'why' introducing a method for localized explanations from global interpretations and offering a plug-and-play solution adaptable to various architectures. The code is available at: https://github.com/ailab-kyunghee/WWW
SPOT: Self-Training with Patch-Order Permutation for Object-Centric Learning with Autoregressive Transformers
PDF ↗Unsupervised object-centric learning aims to decompose scenes into interpretable object entities termed slots. Slot-based auto-encoders stand out as a prominent method for this task. Within them crucial aspects include guiding the encoder to generate object-specific slots and ensuring the decoder utilizes them during reconstruction. This work introduces two novel techniques (i) an attention-based self-training approach which distills superior slot-based attention masks from the decoder to the encoder enhancing object segmentation and (ii) an innovative patch-order permutation strategy for autoregressive transformers that strengthens the role of slot vectors in reconstruction. The effectiveness of these strategies is showcased experimentally. The combined approach significantly surpasses prior slot-based autoencoder methods in unsupervised object segmentation especially with complex real-world images. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/gkakogeorgiou/spot .
Recent works have proposed end-to-end autonomous vehicle (AV) architectures comprised of differentiable modules achieving state-of-the-art driving performance. While they provide advantages over the traditional perception-prediction-planning pipeline (e.g. removing information bottlenecks between components and alleviating integration challenges) they do so using a diverse combination of tasks modules and their interconnectivity. As of yet however there has been no systematic analysis of the necessity of these modules or the impact of their connectivity placement and internal representations on overall driving performance. Addressing this gap our work conducts a comprehensive exploration of the design space of end-to-end modular AV stacks. Our findings culminate in the development of PARA-Drive: a fully parallel end-to-end AV architecture. PARA-Drive not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in perception prediction and planning but also significantly enhances runtime speed by nearly 3x without compromising on interpretability or safety.
This paper studies the problem of concept-based interpretability of transformer representations for videos. Concretely we seek to explain the decision-making process of video transformers based on high-level spatiotemporal concepts that are automatically discovered. Prior research on concept-based interpretability has concentrated solely on image-level tasks. Comparatively video models deal with the added temporal dimension increasing complexity and posing challenges in identifying dynamic concepts over time. In this work we systematically address these challenges by introducing the first Video Transformer Concept Discovery (VTCD) algorithm. To this end we propose an efficient approach for unsupervised identification of units of video transformer representations - concepts and ranking their importance to the output of a model. The resulting concepts are highly interpretable revealing spatio-temporal reasoning mechanisms and object-centric representations in unstructured video models. Performing this analysis jointly over a diverse set of supervised and self-supervised representations we discover that some of these mechanism are universal in video transformers. Finally we show that VTCD can be used for fine-grained action recognition and video object segmentation.
Align and Aggregate: Compositional Reasoning with Video Alignment and Answer Aggregation for Video Question-Answering
PDF ↗Despite the recent progress made in Video Question-Answering (VideoQA) these methods typically function as black-boxes making it difficult to understand their reasoning processes and perform consistent compositional reasoning. To address these challenges we propose a model-agnostic Video Alignment and Answer Aggregation (VA3) framework which is capable of enhancing both compositional consistency and accuracy of existing VidQA methods by integrating video aligner and answer aggregator modules. The video aligner hierarchically selects the relevant video clips based on the question while the answer aggregator deduces the answer to the question based on its sub-questions with compositional consistency ensured by the information flow along the question decompose graph and the contrastive learning strategy. We evaluate our framework on three settings of the AGQA-Decomp dataset with three baseline methods and propose new metrics to measure the compositional consistency of VidQA methods more comprehensively. Moreover we propose a large language model (LLM) based automatic question decompose pipeline to apply our framework on any VidQA data. We extend MSVD and NExT-QA datasets with it to evaluate such scheme and our VA3 framework on broader scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our framework improves both compositional consistency and accuracy of existing methods leading to more interpretable models in real-world applications.