ViT-CX: Causal Explanation of Vision Transformers

ViT-CX: Causal Explanation of Vision Transformers

Weiyan Xie, Xiao-Hui Li, Caleb Chen Cao, Nevin L. Zhang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1569-1577. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/174

Despite the popularity of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and eXplainable AI (XAI), only a few explanation methods have been designed specially for ViTs thus far. They mostly use attention weights of the [CLS] token on patch embeddings and often produce unsatisfactory saliency maps. This paper proposes a novel method for explaining ViTs called ViT-CX. It is based on patch embeddings, rather than attentions paid to them, and their causal impacts on the model output. Other characteristics of ViTs such as causal overdetermination are considered in the design of ViT-CX. The empirical results show that ViT-CX produces more meaningful saliency maps and does a better job revealing all important evidence for the predictions than previous methods. The explanation generated by ViT-CX also shows significantly better faithfulness to the model. The codes and appendix are available at https://github.com/vaynexie/CausalX-ViT.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Interpretability and transparency
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Explainability and interpretability
Machine Learning: ML: Explainable/Interpretable machine learning