COMIX: Compositional Explanations using Prototypes

Aligning machine representations with human understanding is key to improving interpretability of machine learning (ML) models. When classifying a new image, humans often explain their decisions by decomposing the image into concepts and pointing to corresponding regions in familiar images. Current ML explanation techniques typically either trace decision-making processes to reference prototypes, generate attribution maps highlighting feature importance, or incorporate intermediate bottlenecks designed to align with human-interpretable concepts. The proposed method, named COMIX, classifies an image by decomposing it into regions based on learned concepts and tracing each region to corresponding ones in images from the training dataset, assuring that explanations fully represent the actual decision-making process. We dissect the test image into selected internal representations of a neural network to derive prototypical parts (primitives) and match them with the corresponding primitives derived from the training data. In a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments, we theoretically prove and demonstrate that our method, in contrast to post hoc analysis, provides fidelity of explanations and shows that the efficiency is competitive with other inherently interpretable architectures. Notably, it shows substantial improvements in fidelity and sparsity metrics, including 48.82% improvement in the C-insertion score on the ImageNet dataset over the best state-of-the-art baseline.

Complex-Cycle-Consistent Diffusion Model for Monaural Speech Enhancement

In this paper, we present a novel diffusion model-based monaural speech enhancement method. Our approach incorporates the separate estimation of speech spectra's magnitude and phase in two diffusion networks. Throughout the diffusion process, noise clips from real-world noise interferences are added gradually to the clean speech spectra and a noise-aware reverse process is proposed to learn how to generate both clean speech spectra and noise spectra. Furthermore, to fully leverage the intrinsic relationship between magnitude and phase, we introduce a complex-cycle-consistent (CCC) mechanism that uses the estimated magnitude to map the phase, and vice versa. We implement this algorithm within a phase-aware speech enhancement diffusion model (SEDM). We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting the significant benefits of exploiting the intrinsic relationship between phase and magnitude information to enhance speech. The comparison to conventional diffusion models demonstrates the superiority of SEDM.

UNICAD: A Unified Approach for Attack Detection, Noise Reduction and Novel Class Identification

As the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) becomes pervasive, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks and limitations in handling unseen classes poses significant challenges. The state-of-the-art offers discrete solutions aimed to tackle individual issues covering specific adversarial attack scenarios, classification or evolving learning. However, real-world systems need to be able to detect and recover from a wide range of adversarial attacks without sacrificing classification accuracy and to flexibly act in {\bf unseen} scenarios. In this paper, UNICAD, is proposed as a novel framework that integrates a variety of techniques to provide an adaptive solution. For the targeted image classification, UNICAD achieves accurate image classification, detects unseen classes, and recovers from adversarial attacks using Prototype and Similarity-based DNNs with denoising autoencoders. Our experiments performed on the CIFAR-10 dataset highlight UNICAD's effectiveness in adversarial mitigation and unseen class classification, outperforming traditional models.

Federated Adversarial Learning for Robust Autonomous Landing Runway Detection

As the development of deep learning techniques in autonomous landing systems continues to grow, one of the major challenges is trust and security in the face of possible adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a federated adversarial learning-based framework to detect landing runways using paired data comprising of clean local data and its adversarial version. Firstly, the local model is pre-trained on a large-scale lane detection dataset. Then, instead of exploiting large instance-adaptive models, we resort to a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method known as scale and shift deep features (SSF), upon the pre-trained model. Secondly, in each SSF layer, distributions of clean local data and its adversarial version are disentangled for accurate statistics estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first instance of federated learning work that address the adversarial sample problem in landing runway detection. Our experimental evaluations over both synthesis and real images of Landing Approach Runway Detection (LARD) dataset consistently demonstrate good performance of the proposed federated adversarial learning and robust to adversarial attacks.

PUDD: Towards Robust Multi-modal Prototype-based Deepfake Detection

Deepfake techniques generate highly realistic data, making it challenging for humans to discern between actual and artificially generated images. Recent advancements in deep learning-based deepfake detection methods, particularly with diffusion models, have shown remarkable progress. However, there is a growing demand for real-world applications to detect unseen individuals, deepfake techniques, and scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a Prototype-based Unified Framework for Deepfake Detection (PUDD). PUDD offers a detection system based on similarity, comparing input data against known prototypes for video classification and identifying potential deepfakes or previously unseen classes by analyzing drops in similarity. Our extensive experiments reveal three key findings: (1) PUDD achieves an accuracy of 95.1% on Celeb-DF, outperforming state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods; (2) PUDD leverages image classification as the upstream task during training, demonstrating promising performance in both image classification and deepfake detection tasks during inference; (3) PUDD requires only 2.7 seconds for retraining on new data and emits 10$^{5}$ times less carbon compared to the state-of-the-art model, making it significantly more environmentally friendly.

IMAFD: An Interpretable Multi-stage Approach to Flood Detection from time series Multispectral Data

In this paper, we address two critical challenges in the domain of flood detection: the computational expense of large-scale time series change detection and the lack of interpretable decision-making processes on explainable AI (XAI). To overcome these challenges, we proposed an interpretable multi-stage approach to flood detection, IMAFD has been proposed. It provides an automatic, efficient and interpretable solution suitable for large-scale remote sensing tasks and offers insight into the decision-making process. The proposed IMAFD approach combines the analysis of the dynamic time series image sequences to identify images with possible flooding with the static, within-image semantic segmentation. It combines anomaly detection (at both image and pixel level) with semantic segmentation. The flood detection problem is addressed through four stages: (1) at a sequence level: identifying the suspected images (2) at a multi-image level: detecting change within suspected images (3) at an image level: semantic segmentation of images into Land, Water or Cloud class (4) decision making. Our contributions are two folder. First, we efficiently reduced the number of frames to be processed for dense change detection by providing a multi-stage holistic approach to flood detection. Second, the proposed semantic change detection method (stage 3) provides human users with an interpretable decision-making process, while most of the explainable AI (XAI) methods provide post hoc explanations. The evaluation of the proposed IMAFD framework was performed on three datasets, WorldFloods, RavAEn and MediaEval. For all the above datasets, the proposed framework demonstrates a competitive performance compared to other methods offering also interpretability and insight.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation within Deep Foundation Latent Spaces

The vision transformer-based foundation models, such as ViT or Dino-V2, are aimed at solving problems with little or no finetuning of features. Using a setting of prototypical networks, we analyse to what extent such foundation models can solve unsupervised domain adaptation without finetuning over the source or target domain. Through quantitative analysis, as well as qualitative interpretations of decision making, we demonstrate that the suggested method can improve upon existing baselines, as well as showcase the limitations of such approach yet to be solved.

Towards interpretable-by-design deep learning algorithms

The proposed framework named IDEAL (Interpretable-by-design DEep learning ALgorithms) recasts the standard supervised classification problem into a function of similarity to a set of prototypes derived from the training data, while taking advantage of existing latent spaces of large neural networks forming so-called Foundation Models (FM). This addresses the issue of explainability (stage B) while retaining the benefits from the tremendous achievements offered by DL models (e.g., visual transformers, ViT) pre-trained on huge data sets such as IG-3.6B + ImageNet-1K or LVD-142M (stage A). We show that one can turn such DL models into conceptually simpler, explainable-through-prototypes ones. The key findings can be summarized as follows: (1) the proposed models are interpretable through prototypes, mitigating the issue of confounded interpretations, (2) the proposed IDEAL framework circumvents the issue of catastrophic forgetting allowing efficient class-incremental learning, and (3) the proposed IDEAL approach demonstrates that ViT architectures narrow the gap between finetuned and non-finetuned models allowing for transfer learning in a fraction of time \textbf{without} finetuning of the feature space on a target dataset with iterative supervised methods.

An Interpretable Deep Semantic Segmentation Method for Earth Observation

Earth observation is fundamental for a range of human activities including flood response as it offers vital information to decision makers. Semantic segmentation plays a key role in mapping the raw hyper-spectral data coming from the satellites into a human understandable form assigning class labels to each pixel. In this paper, we introduce a prototype-based interpretable deep semantic segmentation (IDSS) method, which is highly accurate as well as interpretable. Its parameters are in orders of magnitude less than the number of parameters used by deep networks such as U-Net and are clearly interpretable by humans. The proposed here IDSS offers a transparent structure that allows users to inspect and audit the algorithm's decision. Results have demonstrated that IDSS could surpass other algorithms, including U-Net, in terms of IoU (Intersection over Union) total water and Recall total water. We used WorldFloods data set for our experiments and plan to use the semantic segmentation results combined with masks for permanent water to detect flood events.

Multi-Branch with Attention Network for Hand-Based Person Recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel hand-based person recognition method for the purpose of criminal investigations since the hand image is often the only available information in cases of serious crime such as sexual abuse. Our proposed method, Multi-Branch with Attention Network (MBA-Net), incorporates both channel and spatial attention modules in branches in addition to a global (without attention) branch to capture global structural information for discriminative feature learning. The attention modules focus on the relevant features of the hand image while suppressing the irrelevant backgrounds. In order to overcome the weakness of the attention mechanisms, equivariant to pixel shuffling, we integrate relative positional encodings into the spatial attention module to capture the spatial positions of pixels. Extensive evaluations on two large multi-ethnic and publicly available hand datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the existing hand-based identification methods.