c-Eval: A Unified Metric to Evaluate Feature-based Explanations via Perturbation

Abstract: In many modern image-classification applications, understanding the cause of model's prediction can be as critical as the prediction's accuracy itself. Various feature-based local explanations generation methods have been designed to give us more insights on the decision of complex classifiers. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on evaluating the quality of different explanations. In response to this lack of comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the c-Eval metric and its corresponding framework to quantify the feature-based local explanation's quality. Given a classifier's prediction and the corresponding explanation on that prediction, c-Eval is the minimum-distortion perturbation that successfully alters the prediction while keeping the explanation's features unchanged. We then demonstrate how c-Eval can be computed using some modifications on existing adversarial generation libraries. To show that c-Eval captures the importance of input's features, we establish the connection between c-Eval and the features returned by explainers in affine and nearly-affine classifiers. We then introduce the c-Eval plot, which not only displays a strong connection between c-Eval and explainers' quality, but also helps automatically determine explainer's parameters. Since the generation of c-Eval relies on adversarial generation, we provide a demo of c-Eval on adversarial-robust models and show that the metric is applicable in those models. Finally, extensive experiments of explainers on different datasets are conducted to support the adoption of c-Eval in evaluating explainers' performance.