Unsupervised discovery of interpretable visual concepts

Providing interpretability of deep-learning models to non-experts, while fundamental for a responsible real-world usage, is challenging. Attribution maps from xAI techniques, such as Integrated Gradients, are a typical example of a visualization technique containing a high level of information, but with difficult interpretation. In this paper, we propose two methods, Maximum Activation Groups Extraction (MAGE) and Multiscale Interpretable Visualization (Ms-IV), to explain the model's decision, enhancing global interpretability. MAGE finds, for a given CNN, combinations of features which, globally, form a semantic meaning, that we call concepts. We group these similar feature patterns by clustering in “concepts”, that we visualize through Ms-IV. This last method is inspired by Occlusion and Sensitivity analysis (incorporating causality) and uses a novel metric, called Class-aware Order Correlation (CAOC), to globally evaluate the most important image regions according to the model's decision space. We compare our approach to xAI methods such as LIME and Integrated Gradients. Experimental results evince the Ms-IV higher localization and faithfulness values. Finally, qualitative evaluation of combined MAGE and Ms-IV demonstrates humans' ability to agree, based on the visualization, with the decision of clusters' concepts; and, to detect, among a given set of networks, the existence of bias. •We introduce Maximum Activation Groups Extraction (MAGE) to represent feature maps.•The representations are based on activation patterns localization in multiple images.•We introduce Class-aware Order Correlation (CAOC), to determine occlusion impacts.•We introduce Multiscale Interpretable Visualization (Ms-IV) highlighting image parts.•CAOC, used with Ms-IV, considers the relation of dataset images according to the model.