Understanding deep networks via extremal perturbations and smooth masks

Attribution is the problem of finding which parts of an image are the most responsible for the output of a deep neural network. An important family of attribution methods is based on measuring the effect of perturbations applied to the input image, either via exhaustive search or by finding representative perturbations via optimization. In this paper, we discuss some of the shortcomings of existing approaches to perturbation analysis and address them by introducing the concept of extremal perturbations, which are theoretically grounded and interpretable. We also introduce a number of technical innovations to compute these extremal perturbations, including a new area constraint and a parametric family of smooth perturbations, which allow us to remove all tunable weighing factors from the optimization problem. We analyze the effect of perturbations as a function of their area, demonstrating excellent sensitivity to the spatial properties of the network under stimulation. We also extend perturbation analysis to the intermediate layers of a deep neural network. This application allows us to show how compactly an image can be represented (in terms of the number of channels it requires). We also demonstrate that the consistency with which images of a given class rely on the same intermediate channel correlates well with class accuracy.