# Improving Network Interpretability via Explanation Consistency Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04600/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Network Dissection: Quantifying Interpretability of Deep Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05796/) (2017)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10758/) (2018)
- [Interpretation of Neural Networks is Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10547/) (2017)
- [Evaluating the visualization of what a Deep Neural Network has learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06321/) (2015)
- [Understanding Deep Image Representations by Inverting Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.0035/) (2014)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [Top-down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00507/) (2016)
- [Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07451/) (2019)
- [Eigen-CAM: Class Activation Map using Principal Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00299/) (2020)
- [Inverting Visual Representations with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02753/) (2015)
- [Cost-Effective Active Learning for Deep Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03551/) (2017)
- [Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00935/) (2017)
- [Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02312/) (2020)
- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Hierarchical, Interpretable, Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02468/) (2026)
- [Agentic AI-Empowered Conversational Embodied Intelligence Networks in 6G](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19865/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance, they tend to lack transparency in prediction. The pursuit of greater interpretability in neural networks often results in a degradation of their original performance. Some works strive to improve both interpretability and performance, but they primarily depend on meticulously imposed conditions. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework that acquires more explainable activation heatmaps and simultaneously increase the model performance, without the need for any extra supervision. Specifically, our concise framework introduces a new metric, i.e., explanation consistency, to reweight the training samples adaptively in model learning. The explanation consistency metric is utilized to measure the similarity between the model's visual explanations of the original samples and those of semantic-preserved adversarial samples, whose background regions are perturbed by using image adversarial attack techniques. Our framework then promotes the model learning by paying closer attention to those training samples with a high difference in explanations (i.e., low explanation consistency), for which the current model cannot provide robust interpretations. Comprehensive experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework in multiple aspects, including higher recognition accuracy, greater data debiasing capability, stronger network robustness, and more precise localization ability on both regular networks and interpretable networks. We also provide extensive ablation studies and qualitative analyses to unveil the detailed contribution of each component.