Less is More: The Influence of Pruning on the Explainability of CNNs

Modern, state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision have millions of parameters. Thus, explaining the complex decisions of such networks to humans is challenging. A technical approach to reduce CNN complexity is network pruning, where less important parameters are deleted. The work presented in this paper investigates whether this technical complexity reduction also helps with perceived explainability. To do so, we conducted a pre-study and two human-grounded experiments, assessing the effects of different pruning ratios on CNN explainability. Overall, we evaluated four different compression rates (i.e., CPR 2, 4, 8, and 32) with 37 500 tasks on Mechanical Turk. Results indicate that lower compression rates have a positive influence on explainability, while higher compression rates show negative effects. Furthermore, we were able to identify sweet spots that increase both the perceived explainability and the model's performance.