PCNN: Probable-Class Nearest-Neighbor Explanations Improve Fine-Grained Image Classification Accuracy for AIs and Humans

Abstract: Nearest neighbors (NN) are traditionally used to compute final decisions, e.g., in Support Vector Machines or k-NN classifiers, and to provide users with explanations for the model's decision. In this paper, we show a novel utility of nearest neighbors: To improve predictions of a frozen, pretrained image classifier C. We leverage an image comparator S that (1) compares the input image with NN images from the top-K most probable classes given by C; and (2) uses scores from S to weight the confidence scores of C to refine predictions. Our method consistently improves fine-grained image classification accuracy on CUB-200, Cars-196, and Dogs-120. Also, a human study finds that showing users our probable-class nearest neighbors (PCNN) reduces over-reliance on AI, thus improving their decision accuracy over prior work which only shows only the most-probable (top-1) class examples.