CHIP: Channel-wise Disentangled Interpretation of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: With the widespread applications of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), it becomes increasingly important for DCNNs not only to make accurate predictions but also to explain how they make their decisions. In this work, we propose a CHannel-wise disentangled InterPretation (CHIP) model to give the visual interpretation to the predictions of DCNNs. The proposed model distills the class-discriminative importance of channels in networks by utilizing the sparse regularization. Here, we first introduce the network perturbation technique to learn the model. The proposed model is capable to not only distill the global perspective knowledge from networks but also present the class-discriminative visual interpretation for specific predictions of networks. It is noteworthy that the proposed model is able to interpret different layers of networks without re-training. By combining the distilled interpretation knowledge in different layers, we further propose the Refined CHIP visual interpretation that is both high-resolution and class-discriminative. Experimental results on the standard dataset demonstrate that the proposed model provides promising visual interpretation for the predictions of networks in image classification task compared with existing visual interpretation methods. Besides, the proposed method outperforms related approaches in the application of ILSVRC 2015 weakly-supervised localization task.