Interpretability is in the eye of the beholder: Human versus artificial classification of image segments generated by humans versus XAI

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

The evaluation of explainable artificial intelligence is challenging, because automated and human-centred metrics of explanation quality may diverge. To clarify their relationship, we investigated whether human and artificial image classification will benefit from the same visual explanations. In three experiments, we analysed human reaction times, errors, and subjective ratings while participants classified image segments. These segments either reflected human attention (eye movements, manual selections) or the outputs of two attribution methods explaining a ResNet (Grad-CAM, XRAI). We also had this model classify the same segments. Humans and the model largely agreed on the interpretability of attribution methods: Grad-CAM was easily interpretable for indoor scenes and landscapes, but not for objects, while the reverse pattern was observed for XRAI. Conversely, human and model performance diverged for human-generated segments. Our results caution against general statements about interpretability, as it varies with the explanation method, the explained images, and the agent interpreting them.

Details

Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational journal of human computer interaction
Volume2024
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-8389-8869/work/154738717
Mendeley d29c9998-ce62-3696-8941-8622770708d4
Scopus 85187179353

Keywords

Keywords

  • deep neural networks (DNN), image classification, attention maps, interpretability, Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)