This is not the Texture you are looking for! Introducing Novel Counterfactual Explanations for Non-Experts using Generative Adversarial Learning

With the ongoing rise of machine learning, the need for methods for explaining decisions made by artificial intelligence systems is becoming a more and more important topic. Especially for image classification tasks, many state-of-the-art tools to explain such classifiers rely on visual highlighting of important areas of the input data. Contrary, counterfactual explanation systems try to enable a counterfactual reasoning by modifying the input image in a way such that the classifier would have made a different prediction. By doing so, the users of counterfactual explanation systems are equipped with a completely different kind of explanatory information. However, methods for generating realistic counterfactual explanations for image classifiers are still rare. In this work, we present a novel approach to generate such counterfactual image explanations based on adversarial image-to-image translation techniques. Additionally, we conduct a user study to evaluate our approach in a use case which was inspired by a healthcare scenario. Our results show that our approach leads to significantly better results regarding mental models, explanation satisfaction, trust, emotions, and self-efficacy than two state-of-the art systems that work with saliency maps, namely LIME and LRP.