Fast and Simple Explainability for Point Cloud Networks

We propose a fast and simple explainable AI (XAI) method for point cloud data. It computes pointwise importance with respect to a trained network downstream task. This allows better understanding of the network properties, which is imperative for safety-critical applications. In addition to debugging and visualization, our low computational complexity facilitates online feedback to the network at inference. This can be used to reduce uncertainty and to increase robustness. In this work, we introduce \emph{Feature Based Interpretability} (FBI), where we compute the features' norm, per point, before the bottleneck. We analyze the use of gradients and post- and pre-bottleneck strategies, showing pre-bottleneck is preferred, in terms of smoothness and ranking. We obtain at least three orders of magnitude speedup, compared to current XAI methods, thus, scalable for big point clouds or large-scale architectures. Our approach achieves SOTA results, in terms of classification explainability. We demonstrate how the proposed measure is helpful in analyzing and characterizing various aspects of 3D learning, such as rotation invariance, robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) outliers or domain shift and dataset bias.

DXAI: Explaining Classification by Image Decomposition

We propose a new way to explain and to visualize neural network classification through a decomposition-based explainable AI (DXAI). Instead of providing an explanation heatmap, our method yields a decomposition of the image into class-agnostic and class-distinct parts, with respect to the data and chosen classifier. Following a fundamental signal processing paradigm of analysis and synthesis, the original image is the sum of the decomposed parts. We thus obtain a radically different way of explaining classification. The class-agnostic part ideally is composed of all image features which do not posses class information, where the class-distinct part is its complementary. This new visualization can be more helpful and informative in certain scenarios, especially when the attributes are dense, global and additive in nature, for instance, when colors or textures are essential for class distinction. Code is available at https://github.com/dxai2024/dxai.

Enhancing Neural Training via a Correlated Dynamics Model

As neural networks grow in scale, their training becomes both computationally demanding and rich in dynamics. Amidst the flourishing interest in these training dynamics, we present a novel observation: Parameters during training exhibit intrinsic correlations over time. Capitalizing on this, we introduce Correlation Mode Decomposition (CMD). This algorithm clusters the parameter space into groups, termed modes, that display synchronized behavior across epochs. This enables CMD to efficiently represent the training dynamics of complex networks, like ResNets and Transformers, using only a few modes. Moreover, test set generalization is enhanced. We introduce an efficient CMD variant, designed to run concurrently with training. Our experiments indicate that CMD surpasses the state-of-the-art method for compactly modeled dynamics on image classification. Our modeling can improve training efficiency and lower communication overhead, as shown by our preliminary experiments in the context of federated learning.

Critical Points ++: An Agile Point Cloud Importance Measure for Robust Classification, Adversarial Defense and Explainable AI

The ability to cope accurately and fast with Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) samples is crucial in real-world safety demanding applications. In this work we first study the interplay between critical points of 3D point clouds and OOD samples. Our findings are that common corruptions and outliers are often interpreted as critical points. We generalize the notion of critical points into importance measures. We show that training a classification network based only on less important points dramatically improves robustness, at a cost of minor performance loss on the clean set. We observe that normalized entropy is highly informative for corruption analysis. An adaptive threshold based on normalized entropy is suggested for selecting the set of uncritical points. Our proposed importance measure is extremely fast to compute. We show it can be used for a variety of applications, such as Explainable AI (XAI), Outlier Removal, Uncertainty Estimation, Robust Classification and Adversarial Defense. We reach SOTA results on the two latter tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/yossilevii100/critical_points2

Additive Class Distinction Maps using Branched-GANs

We present a new model, training procedure and architecture to create precise maps of distinction between two classes of images. The objective is to comprehend, in pixel-wise resolution, the unique characteristics of a class. These maps can facilitate self-supervised segmentation and objectdetection in addition to new capabilities in explainable AI (XAI). Our proposed architecture is based on image decomposition, where the output is the sum of multiple generative networks (branched-GANs). The distinction between classes is isolated in a dedicated branch. This approach allows clear, precise and interpretable visualization of the unique characteristics of each class. We show how our generic method can be used in several modalities for various tasks, such as MRI brain tumor extraction, isolating cars in aerial photography and obtaining feminine and masculine face features. This is a preliminary report of our initial findings and results.

EPiC: Ensemble of Partial Point Clouds for Robust Classification

Robust point cloud classification is crucial for real-world applications, as consumer-type 3D sensors often yield partial and noisy data, degraded by various artifacts. In this work we propose a general ensemble framework, based on partial point cloud sampling. Each ensemble member is exposed to only partial input data. Three sampling strategies are used jointly, two local ones, based on patches and curves, and a global one of random sampling. We demonstrate the robustness of our method to various local and global degradations. We show that our framework significantly improves the robustness of top classification netowrks by a large margin. Our experimental setting uses the recently introduced ModelNet-C database by Ren et al.[24], where we reach SOTA both on unaugmented and on augmented data. Our unaugmented mean Corruption Error (mCE) is 0.64 (current SOTA is 0.86) and 0.50 for augmented data (current SOTA is 0.57). We analyze and explain these remarkable results through diversity analysis.

Graph Laplacian for Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning is highly useful in common scenarios where labeled data is scarce but unlabeled data is abundant. The graph (or nonlocal) Laplacian is a fundamental smoothing operator for solving various learning tasks. For unsupervised clustering, a spectral embedding is often used, based on graph-Laplacian eigenvectors. For semi-supervised problems, the common approach is to solve a constrained optimization problem, regularized by a Dirichlet energy, based on the graph-Laplacian. However, as supervision decreases, Dirichlet optimization becomes suboptimal. We therefore would like to obtain a smooth transition between unsupervised clustering and low-supervised graph-based classification. In this paper, we propose a new type of graph-Laplacian which is adapted for Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) problems. It is based on both density and contrastive measures and allows the encoding of the labeled data directly in the operator. Thus, we can perform successfully semi-supervised learning using spectral clustering. The benefits of our approach are illustrated for several SSL problems.

The Underlying Correlated Dynamics in Neural Training

Training of neural networks is a computationally intensive task. The significance of understanding and modeling the training dynamics is growing as increasingly larger networks are being trained. We propose in this work a model based on the correlation of the parameters' dynamics, which dramatically reduces the dimensionality. We refer to our algorithm as \emph{correlation mode decomposition} (CMD). It splits the parameter space into groups of parameters (modes) which behave in a highly correlated manner through the epochs. We achieve a remarkable dimensionality reduction with this approach, where networks like ResNet-18, transformers and GANs, containing millions of parameters, can be modeled well using just a few modes. We observe each typical time profile of a mode is spread throughout the network in all layers. Moreover, our model induces regularization which yields better generalization capacity on the test set. This representation enhances the understanding of the underlying training dynamics and can pave the way for designing better acceleration techniques.

BASiS: Batch Aligned Spectral Embedding Space

Graph is a highly generic and diverse representation, suitable for almost any data processing problem. Spectral graph theory has been shown to provide powerful algorithms, backed by solid linear algebra theory. It thus can be extremely instrumental to design deep network building blocks with spectral graph characteristics. For instance, such a network allows the design of optimal graphs for certain tasks or obtaining a canonical orthogonal low-dimensional embedding of the data. Recent attempts to solve this problem were based on minimizing Rayleigh-quotient type losses. We propose a different approach of directly learning the eigensapce. A severe problem of the direct approach, applied in batch-learning, is the inconsistent mapping of features to eigenspace coordinates in different batches. We analyze the degrees of freedom of learning this task using batches and propose a stable alignment mechanism that can work both with batch changes and with graph-metric changes. We show that our learnt spectral embedding is better in terms of NMI, ACC, Grassman distance, orthogonality and classification accuracy, compared to SOTA. In addition, the learning is more stable.

Analysis of Branch Specialization and its Application in Image Decomposition

Branched neural networks have been used extensively for a variety of tasks. Branches are sub-parts of the model that perform independent processing followed by aggregation. It is known that this setting induces a phenomenon called Branch Specialization, where different branches become experts in different sub-tasks. Such observations were qualitative by nature. In this work, we present a methodological analysis of Branch Specialization. We explain the role of gradient descent in this phenomenon. We show that branched generative networks naturally decompose animal images to meaningful channels of fur, whiskers and spots and face images to channels such as different illumination components and face parts.