Representativity and Consistency Measures for Deep Neural Network Explanations

The adoption of machine learning in critical contexts requires a reliable explanation of why the algorithm makes certain predictions. To address this issue, many methods have been proposed to explain the predictions of these black box models. Despite the choice of those many methods, little effort has been made to ensure that the explanations produced are objectively relevant. While it is possible to establish a number of desirable properties of a good explanation, it is more difficult to evaluate them. As a result, no measures are actually associated with the properties of consistency and generalization of explanations. We are introducing a new procedure to compute two new measures, Relative Consistency ReCo and Mean Generalization M eGe, respectively for consistency and generalization of explanations. Our results on several image classification datasets using progressively degraded models allow us to validate empirically the reliability of those measures. We compare the results obtained with those of existing measures. Finally we demonstrate the potential of the measures by applying them to different families of models, revealing an interesting link between gradient-based explanations methods and 1-Lipschitz networks.