# Learning Robust Convolutional Neural Networks with Relevant Feature Focusing via Explanations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04237 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04237/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05006/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [Learning De-biased Representations with Biased Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02806/) (2019)
- [Interpretations are useful: penalizing explanations to align neural networks with prior knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13584/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptation for Visual Applications: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05374/) (2017)
- [Why Can't I Dance in the Mall? Learning to Mitigate Scene Bias in Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05534/) (2019)
- [Attention Branch Network: Learning of Attention Mechanism for Visual Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10025/) (2018)
- [Don't Judge an Object by Its Context: Learning to Overcome Contextual Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03152/) (2020)
- [Self-training Avoids Using Spurious Features Under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10032/) (2020)
- [Examining and Combating Spurious Features under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07171/) (2021)
- [Embedding Human Knowledge into Deep Neural Network via Attention Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03540/) (2019)
- [Skin Lesion Classification Using Hybrid Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08434/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing image recognition techniques based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) basically assume that the training and test datasets are sampled from i.i.d distributions. However, this assumption is easily broken in the real world because of the distribution shift that occurs when the co-occurrence relations between objects and backgrounds in input images change. Under this type of distribution shift, CNNs learn to focus on features that are not task-relevant, such as backgrounds from the training data, and degrade their accuracy on the test data. To tackle this problem, we propose relevant feature focusing (ReFF). ReFF detects task-relevant features and regularizes CNNs via explanation outputs (e.g., Grad-CAM). Since ReFF is composed of post-hoc explanation modules, it can be easily applied to off-the-shelf CNNs. Furthermore, ReFF requires no additional inference cost at test time because it is only used for regularization while training. We demonstrate that CNNs trained with ReFF focus on features relevant to the target task and that ReFF improves the test-time accuracy.