# Explainability and Robustness of Deep Visual Classification Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01343/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 132 of its 160 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 132)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the computer vision community, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), first proposed in the 1980's, have become the standard visual classification model. Recently, as alternatives to CNNs, Capsule Networks (CapsNets) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been proposed. CapsNets, which were inspired by the information processing of the human brain, are considered to have more inductive bias than CNNs, whereas ViTs are considered to have less inductive bias than CNNs. All three classification models have received great attention since they can serve as backbones for various downstream tasks. However, these models are far from being perfect. As pointed out by the community, there are two weaknesses in standard Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). One of the limitations of DNNs is the lack of explainability. Even though they can achieve or surpass human expert performance in the image classification task, the DNN-based decisions are difficult to understand. In many real-world applications, however, individual decisions need to be explained. The other limitation of DNNs is adversarial vulnerability. Concretely, the small and imperceptible perturbations of inputs can mislead DNNs. The vulnerability of deep neural networks poses challenges to current visual classification models. The potential threats thereof can lead to unacceptable consequences. Besides, studying model adversarial vulnerability can lead to a better understanding of the underlying models. Our research aims to address the two limitations of DNNs. Specifically, we focus on deep visual classification models, especially the core building parts of each classification model, e.g. dynamic routing in CapsNets and self-attention module in ViTs.