Born Identity Network: Multi-way Counterfactual Map Generation to Explain a Classifier's Decision

There exists an apparent negative correlation between performance and interpretability of deep learning models. In an effort to reduce this negative correlation, we propose Born Identity Network (BIN), which is a post-hoc approach for producing multi-way counterfactual maps. A counterfactual map transforms an input sample to be classified as a target label, which is similar to how humans process knowledge through counterfactual thinking. Thus, producing a better counterfactual map may be a step towards explanation at the level of human knowledge. For example, a counterfactual map can localize hypothetical abnormalities from a normal brain image that may cause it to be diagnosed with a disease. Specifically, our proposed BIN consists of two core components: Counterfactual Map Generator and Target Attribution Network. The Counterfactual Map Generator is a variation of conditional GAN which can synthesize a counterfactual map conditioned on an arbitrary target label. The Target Attribution Network works in a complementary manner to enforce target label attribution to the synthesized map. We have validated our proposed BIN in qualitative, quantitative analysis on MNIST, 3D Shapes, and ADNI datasets, and show the comprehensibility and fidelity of our method from various ablation studies.