# Explainable AI Approach using Near Misses Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16895/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [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)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07374/) (2019)
- [Top-down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00507/) (2016)
- [Distilling a Neural Network Into a Soft Decision Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09784/) (2017)
- [Interpreting CNNs via Decision Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00121/) (2018)
- [Distill-and-Compare: Auditing Black-Box Models Using Transparent Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06169/) (2017)
- [Interpretable and Fine-Grained Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02686/) (2019)
- [Learning to Explain with Complemental Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01280/) (2018)
- [Predicting Adversarial Examples with High Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04457/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a novel XAI approach based on near-misses analysis (NMA). This approach reveals a hierarchy of logical 'concepts' inferred from the latent decision-making process of a Neural Network (NN) without delving into its explicit structure. We examined our proposed XAI approach on different network architectures that vary in size and shape (e.g., ResNet, VGG, EfficientNet, MobileNet) on several datasets (ImageNet and CIFAR100). The results demonstrate its usability to reflect NNs latent process of concepts generation. We generated a new metric for explainability. Moreover, our experiments suggest that efficient architectures, which achieve a similar accuracy level with much less neurons may still pay the price of explainability and robustness in terms of concepts generation. We, thus, pave a promising new path for XAI research to follow.