# Visualizing the Impact of Feature Attribution Baselines

Jan. 10, 2020

### DOI

10.23915/distill.00022

Path attribution methods are a gradient-based way of explaining deep models. These methods require choosing a hyperparameter known as the baseline input. What does this hyperparameter mean, and how important is it? In this article, we investigate these questions using image classification networks as a case study. We discuss several different ways to choose a baseline input and the assumptions that are implicit in each baseline. Although we focus here on path attribution methods, our discussion of baselines is closely connected with the concept of missingness in the feature space - a concept that is critical to interpretability research.

## Introduction

If you are in the business of training neural networks, you might have heard of the integrated gradients method, which was introduced at ICML two years ago . The method computes which features are important to a neural network when making a prediction on a particular data point. This helps users understand which features their network relies on. Since its introduction, integrated gradients has been used to interpret networks trained on a variety of data types, including retinal fundus images and electrocardiogram recordings .

If you’ve ever used integrated gradients, you know that you need to define a baseline input $$x’$$ before using the method. Although the original paper discusses the need for a baseline and even proposes several different baselines for image data - including the constant black image and an image of random noise - there is little existing research about the impact of this baseline. Is integrated gradients sensitive to the hyperparameter choice? Why is the constant black image a “natural baseline” for image data? Are there any alternative choices?

In this article, we will delve into how this hyperparameter choice arises, and why understanding it is important when you are doing model interpretation. As a case-study, we will focus on image classification models in order to visualize the effects of the baseline input. We will explore several notions of missingness, including both constant baselines and baselines defined by distributions. Finally, we will discuss different ways to compare baseline choices and talk about why quantitative evaluation remains a difficult problem.

## Image Classification

We focus on image classification as a task, as it will allow us to visually plot integrated gradients attributions, and compare them with our intuition about which pixels we think should be important. We use the Inception V4 architecture , a convolutional neural network designed for the ImageNet dataset , in which the task is to determine which class an image belongs to out of 1000 classes. On the ImageNet validation set, Inception V4 has a top-1 accuracy of over 80%. We download weights from TensorFlow-Slim , and visualize the predictions of the network on four different images from the validation set.

Although state of the art models perform well on unseen data, users may still be left wondering: how did the model figure out which object was in the image? There are a myriad of methods to interpret machine learning models, including methods to visualize and understand how the network represents inputs internally , feature attribution methods that assign an importance score to each feature for a specific input , and saliency methods that aim to highlight which regions of an image the model was looking at when making a decision . These categories are not mutually exclusive: for example, an attribution method can be visualized as a saliency method, and a saliency method can assign importance scores to each individual pixel. In this article, we will focus on the feature attribution method integrated gradients.

Formally, given a target input $$x$$ and a network function $$f$$, feature attribution methods assign an importance score $$\phi_i(f, x)$$ to the $$i$$th feature value representing how much that feature adds or subtracts from the network output. A large positive or negative $$\phi_i(f, x)$$ indicates that feature strongly increases or decreases the network output $$f(x)$$ respectively, while an importance score close to zero indicates that the feature in question did not influence $$f(x)$$.

In the same figure above, we visualize which pixels were most important to the network’s correct prediction using integrated gradients. The pixels in white indicate more important pixels. In order to plot attributions, we follow the same design choices as . That is, we plot the absolute value of the sum of feature attributions across the channel dimension, and cap feature attributions at the 99th percentile to avoid high-magnitude attributions dominating the color scheme.

## A Better Understanding of Integrated Gradients

As you look through the attribution maps, you might find some of them unintuitive. Why does the attribution for “goldfinch” highlight the green background? Why doesn’t the attribution for “killer whale” highlight the black parts of the killer whale? To better understand this behavior, we need to explore how we generated feature attributions. Formally, integrated gradients defines the importance value for the $$i$$th feature value as follows: $$\phi_i^{IG}(f, x, x’) = \overbrace{(x_i - x’_i)}^{\text{Difference from baseline}} \times \underbrace{\int_{\alpha = 0}^ 1}_{\text{From baseline to input…}} \overbrace{\frac{\delta f(x’ + \alpha (x - x’))}{\delta x_i} d \alpha}^{\text{…accumulate local gradients}}$$ where $$x$$ is the current input, $$f$$ is the model function and $$x’$$ is some baseline input that is meant to represent “absence” of feature input. The subscript $$i$$ is used to denote indexing into the $$i$$th feature.

As the formula above states, integrated gradients gets importance scores by accumulating gradients on images interpolated between the baseline value and the current input. But why would doing this make sense? Recall that the gradient of a function represents the direction of maximum increase. The gradient is telling us which pixels have the steepest local slope with respect to the output. For this reason, the gradient of a network at the input was one of the earliest saliency methods.

Unfortunately, there are many problems with using gradients to interpret deep neural networks . One specific issue is that neural networks are prone to a problem known as saturation: the gradients of input features may have small magnitudes around a sample even if the network depends heavily on those features. This can happen if the network function flattens after those features reach a certain magnitude. Intuitively, shifting the pixels in an image by a small amount typically doesn’t change what the network sees in the image. We can illustrate saturation by plotting the network output at all images between the baseline $$x’$$ and the current image. The figure below displays that the network output for the correct class increases initially, but then quickly flattens.

What we really want to know is how our network got from predicting essentially nothing at $$x’$$ to being completely saturated towards the correct output class at $$x$$. Which pixels, when scaled along this path, most increased the network output for the correct class? This is exactly what the formula for integrated gradients gives us.

By integrating over a path, integrated gradients avoids problems with local gradients being saturated. We can break the original equation down and visualize it in three separate parts: the interpolated image between the baseline image and the target image, the gradients at the interpolated image, and accumulating many such gradients over $$\alpha$$. $$\int_{\alpha’ = 0}^{\alpha} \underbrace{(x_i - x’_i) \times \frac{\delta f(\text{ }\overbrace{x’ + \alpha’ (x - x’)}^{\text{(1): Interpolated Image}}\text{ })} {\delta x_i} d \alpha’}_{\text{(2): Gradients at Interpolation}} = \overbrace{\phi_i^{IG}(f, x, x’; \alpha)}^{\text{(3): Cumulative Gradients up to }\alpha}$$ We visualize these three pieces of the formula below.Note that in practice, we use a discrete sum approximation of the integral with 500 linearly-spaced points between 0 and 1.

We have casually omitted one part of the formula: the fact that we multiply by a difference from a baseline. Although we won’t go into detail here, this term falls out because we care about the derivative of the network function $$f$$ with respect to the path we are integrating over. That is, if we integrate over the straight-line between $$x’$$ and $$x$$, which we can represent as $$\gamma(\alpha) = x’ + \alpha(x - x’)$$, then: $$\frac{\delta f(\gamma(\alpha))}{\delta \alpha} = \frac{\delta f(\gamma(\alpha))}{\delta \gamma(\alpha)} \times \frac{\delta \gamma(\alpha)}{\delta \alpha} = \frac{\delta f(x’ + \alpha’ (x - x’))}{\delta x_i} \times (x_i - x’_i)$$ The difference from baseline term is the derivative of the path function $$\gamma$$ with respect to $$\alpha$$. The theory behind integrated gradients is discussed in more detail in the original paper. In particular, the authors show that integrated gradients satisfies several desirable properties, including the completeness axiom: $$\textrm{Axiom 1: Completeness}\\ \sum_i \phi_i^{IG}(f, x, x’) = f(x) - f(x’)$$ Note that this theorem holds for any baseline $$x’$$. Completeness is a desirable property because it states that the importance scores for each feature break down the output of the network: each importance score represents that feature’s individual contribution to the network output, and added when together, we recover the output value itself. Although it’s not essential to our discussion here, we can prove that integrated gradients satisfies this axiom using the fundamental theorem of calculus for path integrals. We leave a full discussion of all of the properties that integrated gradients satisfies to the original paper, since they hold independent of the choice of baseline. The completeness axiom also provides a way to measure convergence.

In practice, we can’t compute the exact value of the integral. Instead, we use a discrete sum approximation with $$k$$ linearly-spaced points between 0 and 1 for some value of $$k$$. If we only chose 1 point to approximate the integral, that feels like too few. Is 10 enough? 100? Intuitively 1,000 may seem like enough, but can we be certain? As proposed in the original paper, we can use the completeness axiom as a sanity check on convergence: run integrated gradients with $$k$$ points, measure $$|\sum_i \phi_i^{IG}(f, x, x’) - (f(x) - f(x’))|$$, and if the difference is large, re-run with a larger $$k$$ Of course, this brings up a new question: what is “large” in this context? One heuristic is to compare the difference with the magnitude of the output itself. .

The line chart above plots the following equation in red: $$\underbrace{\sum_i \phi_i^{IG}(f, x, x’; \alpha)}_{\text{(4): Sum of Cumulative Gradients up to }\alpha}$$ That is, it sums all of the pixel attributions in the saliency map. This lets us compare to the blue line, which plots $$f(x) - f(x’)$$. We can see that with 500 samples, we seem (at least intuitively) to have converged. But this article isn’t about how to get good convergence - it’s about baselines! In order to advance our understanding of the baseline, we will need a brief excursion into the world of game theory.

## Game Theory and Missingness

Integrated gradients is inspired by work from cooperative game theory, specifically the Aumann-Shapley value . In cooperative game theory, a non-atomic game is a construction used to model large-scale economic systems where there are enough participants that it is desirable to model them continuously. Aumann-Shapley values provide a theoretically grounded way to determine how much different groups of participants contribute to the system.

In game theory, a notion of missingness is well-defined. Games are defined on coalitions - sets of participants - and for any specific coalition, a participant of the system can be in or out of that coalition. The fact that games can be evaluated on coalitions is the foundation of the Aumann-Shapley value. Intuitively, it computes how much value a group of participants adds to the game by computing how much the value of the game would increase if we added more of that group to any given coalition.

Unfortunately, missingness is a more difficult notion when we are speaking about machine learning models. In order to evaluate how important the $$i$$th feature is, we want to be able to compute how much the output of the network would increase if we successively increased the “presence” of the $$i$$th feature. But what does this mean, exactly? In order to increase the presence of a feature, we would need to start with the feature being “missing” and have a way of interpolating between that missingness and its current, known value.

Hopefully, this is sounding awfully familiar. Integrated gradients has a baseline input $$x’$$ for exactly this reason: to model a feature being absent. But how should you choose $$x’$$ in order to best represent this? It seems to be common practice to choose a baseline input $$x’$$ to be the vector of all zeros. But consider the following scenario: you’ve learned a model on a healthcare dataset, and one of the features is blood sugar level. The model has correctly learned that excessively low levels of blood sugar, which correspond to hypoglycemia, is dangerous. Does a blood sugar level of $$0$$ seem like a good choice to represent missingness?

The point here is that fixed feature values may have unintended meaning. The problem compounds further when you consider the difference from baseline term $$x_i - x’_i$$. For the sake of a thought experiment, suppose a patient had a blood sugar level of $$0$$. To understand why our machine learning model thinks this patient is at high risk, you run integrated gradients on this data point with a baseline of the all-zeros vector. The blood sugar level of the patient would have $$0$$ feature importance, because $$x_i - x’_i = 0$$. This is despite the fact that a blood sugar level of $$0$$ would be fatal!

We find similar problems when we move to the image domain. If you use a constant black image as a baseline, integrated gradients will not highlight black pixels as important even if black pixels make up the object of interest. More generally, the method is blind to the color you use as a baseline, which we illustrate with the figure below. Note that this was acknowledged by the original authors in , and is in fact central to the definition of a baseline: we wouldn’t want integrated gradients to highlight missing features as important! But then how do we avoid giving zero importance to the baseline color?

## Alternative Baseline Choices

It’s clear that any constant color baseline will have this problem. Are there any alternatives? In this section, we compare four alternative choices for a baseline in the image domain. Before proceeding, it’s important to note that this article isn’t the first article to point out the difficulty of choosing a baselines. Several articles, including the original paper, discuss and compare several notions of “missingness”, both in the context of integrated gradients and more generally . Nonetheless, choosing the right baseline remains a challenge. Here we will present several choices for baselines: some based on existing literature, others inspired by the problems discussed above. The figure at the end of the section visualizes the four baselines presented here.

### The Maximum Distance Baseline

If we are worried about constant baselines that are blind to the baseline color, can we explicitly construct a baseline that doesn’t suffer from this problem? One obvious way to construct such a baseline is to take the farthest image in L1 distance from the current image such that the baseline is still in the valid pixel range. This baseline, which we will refer to as the maximum distance baseline (denoted max dist. in the figure below), avoids the difference from baseline issue directly.

### The Blurred Baseline

The issue with the maximum distance baseline is that it doesn’t really represent missingness. It actually contains a lot of information about the original image, which means we are no longer explaining our prediction relative to a lack of information. To better preserve the notion of missingness, we take inspiration from . In their paper, Fong and Vedaldi use a blurred version of the image as a domain-specific way to represent missing information. This baseline is attractive because it captures the notion of missingness in images in a very human intuitive way. In the figure below, this baseline is denoted blur. The figure lets you play with the smoothing constant used to define the baseline.

### The Uniform Baseline

One potential drawback with the blurred baseline is that it is biased to highlight high-frequency information. Pixels that are very similar to their neighbors may get less importance than pixels that are very different than their neighbors, because the baseline is defined as a weighted average of a pixel and its neighbors. To overcome this, we can again take inspiration from both and the original integrated gradients paper. Another way to define missingness is to simply sample a random uniform image in the valid pixel range and call that the baseline. We refer to this baseline as the uniform baseline in the figure below.

### The Gaussian Baseline

Of course, the uniform distribution is not the only distribution we can draw random noise from. In their paper discussing the SmoothGrad (which we will touch on in the next section), Smilkov et al. make frequent use of a gaussian distribution centered on the current image with variance $$\sigma$$. We can use the same distribution as a baseline for integrated gradients! In the figure below, this baseline is called the gaussian baseline. You can vary the standard deviation of the distribution $$\sigma$$ using the slider. One thing to note here is that we truncate the gaussian baseline in the valid pixel range, which means that as $$\sigma$$ approaches $$\infty$$, the gaussian baseline approaches the uniform baseline.

## Averaging Over Multiple Baselines

You may have nagging doubts about those last two baselines, and you would be right to have them. A randomly generated baseline can suffer from the same blindness problem that a constant image can. If we draw a uniform random image as a baseline, there is a small chance that a baseline pixel will be very close to its corresponding input pixel in value. Those pixels will not be highlighted as important. The resulting saliency map may have artifacts due to the randomly drawn baseline. Is there any way we can fix this problem?

Perhaps the most natural way to do so is to average over multiple different baselines, as discussed in . Although doing so may not be particularly natural for constant color images (which colors do you choose to average over and why?), it is a very natural notion for baselines drawn from distributions. Simply draw more samples from the same distribution and average the importance scores from each sample.

### Assuming a Distribution

At this point, it’s worth connecting the idea of averaging over multiple baselines back to the original definition of integrated gradients. When we average over multiple baselines from the same distribution $$D$$, we are attempting to use the distribution itself as our baseline. We use the distribution to define the notion of missingness: if we don’t know a pixel value, we don’t assume its value to be 0 - instead we assume that it has some underlying distribution $$D$$. Formally, given a baseline distribution $$D$$, we integrate over all possible baselines $$x’ \in D$$ weighted by the density function $$p_D$$: $$\phi_i(f, x) = \underbrace{\int_{x’}}_{\text{Integrate over baselines…}} \bigg( \overbrace{\phi_i^{IG}(f, x, x’ )}^{\text{integrated gradients with baseline } x’ } \times \underbrace{p_D(x’) dx’}_{\text{…and weight by the density}} \bigg)$$

In terms of missingness, assuming a distribution might intuitively feel like a more reasonable assumption to make than assuming a constant value. But this doesn’t quite solve the issue: instead of having to choose a baseline $$x’$$, now we have to choose a baseline distribution $$D$$. Have we simply postponed the problem? We will discuss one theoretically motivated way to choose $$D$$ in an upcoming section, but before we do, we’ll take a brief aside to talk about how we compute the formula above in practice, and a connection to an existing method that arises as a result.

### Expectations, and Connections to SmoothGrad

Now that we’ve introduced a second integral into our formula, we need to do a second discrete sum to approximate it, which requires an additional hyperparameter: the number of baselines to sample. In , Erion et al. make the observation that both integrals can be thought of as expectations: the first integral as an expectation over $$D$$, and the second integral as an expectation over the path between $$x’$$ and $$x$$. This formulation, called expected gradients, is defined formally as: $$\phi_i^{EG}(f, x; D) = \underbrace{\mathop{\mathbb{E}}_{x’ \sim D, \alpha \sim U(0, 1)}}_ {\text{Expectation over $$D$$ and the path…}} \bigg[ \overbrace{(x_i - x’_i) \times \frac{\delta f(x’ + \alpha (x - x’))}{\delta x_i}}^{\text{…of the importance of the } i\text{th pixel}} \bigg]$$

Expected gradients and integrated gradients belong to a family of methods known as “path attribution methods” because they integrate gradients over one or more paths between two valid inputs. Both expected gradients and integrated gradients use straight-line paths, but one can integrate over paths that are not straight as well. This is discussed in more detail in the original paper. To compute expected gradients in practice, we use the following formula: $$\hat{\phi}_i^{EG}(f, x; D) = \frac{1}{k} \sum_{j=1}^k (x_i - x’^j_i) \times \frac{\delta f(x’^j + \alpha^{j} (x - x’^j))}{\delta x_i}$$ where $$x’^j$$ is the $$j$$th sample from $$D$$ and $$\alpha^j$$ is the $$j$$th sample from the uniform distribution between 0 and 1. Now suppose that we use the gaussian baseline with variance $$\sigma^2$$. Then we can re-write the formula for expected gradients as follows: $$\hat{\phi}_i^{EG}(f, x; N(x, \sigma^2 I)) = \frac{1}{k} \sum_{j=1}^k \epsilon_{\sigma}^{j} \times \frac{\delta f(x + (1 - \alpha^j)\epsilon_{\sigma}^{j})}{\delta x_i}$$ where $$\epsilon_{\sigma}\ \sim N(\bar{0}, \sigma^2 I)$$ To see how we arrived at the above formula, first observe that \begin{aligned} x’ \sim N(x, \sigma^2 I) &= x + \epsilon_{\sigma} \\ x’- x &= \epsilon_{\sigma} \\ \end{aligned} by definition of the gaussian baseline. Now we have: \begin{aligned} x’ + \alpha(x - x’) &= \\ x + \epsilon_{\sigma} + \alpha(x - (x + \epsilon_{\sigma})) &= \\ x + (1 - \alpha)\epsilon_{\sigma} \end{aligned} The above formula simply substitues the last line of each equation block back into the formula. . This looks awfully familiar to an existing method called SmoothGrad . If we use the (gradients $$\times$$ input image) variant of SmoothGrad SmoothGrad is was a method designed to sharpen saliency maps and was meant to be run on top of an existing saliency method. The idea is simple: instead of running a saliency method once on an image, first add some gaussian noise to an image, then run the saliency method. Do this several times with different draws of gaussian noise, then average the results. Multipying the gradients by the input and using that as a saliency map is discussed in more detail in the original SmoothGrad paper., then we have the following formula: $$\phi_i^{SG}(f, x; N(\bar{0}, \sigma^2 I)) = \frac{1}{k} \sum_{j=1}^k (x + \epsilon_{\sigma}^{j}) \times \frac{\delta f(x + \epsilon_{\sigma}^{j})}{\delta x_i}$$

We can see that SmoothGrad and expected gradients with a gaussian baseline are quite similar, with two key differences: SmoothGrad multiplies the gradient by $$x + \epsilon_{\sigma}$$ while expected gradients multiplies by just $$\epsilon_{\sigma}$$, and while expected gradients samples uniformly along the path, SmoothGrad always samples the endpoint $$\alpha = 0$$.

Can this connection help us understand why SmoothGrad creates smooth-looking saliency maps? When we assume the above gaussian distribution as our baseline, we are assuming that each of our pixel values is drawn from a gaussian independently of the other pixel values. But we know this is far from true: in images, there is a rich correlation structure between nearby pixels. Once your network knows the value of a pixel, it doesn’t really need to use its immediate neighbors because it’s likely that those immediate neighbors have very similar intensities.

Assuming each pixel is drawn from an independent gaussian breaks this correlation structure. It means that expected gradients tabulates the importance of each pixel independently of the other pixel values. The generated saliency maps will be less noisy and better highlight the object of interest because we are no longer allowing the network to rely on only pixel in a group of correlated pixels. This may be why SmoothGrad is smooth: because it is implicitly assuming independence among pixels. In the figure below, you can compare integrated gradients with a single randomly drawn baseline to expected gradients sampled over a distribution. For the gaussian baseline, you can also toggle the SmoothGrad option to use the SmoothGrad formula above. For all figures, $$k=500$$.

### Using the Training Distribution

Is it really reasonable to assume independence among pixels while generating saliency maps? In supervised learning, we make the assumption that the data is drawn from some distribution $$D_{\text{data}}$$. This assumption that the training and testing data share a common, underlying distribution is what allows us to do supervised learning and make claims about generalizability. Given this assumption, we don’t need to model missingness using a gaussian or a uniform distribution: we can use $$D_{\text{data}}$$ to model missingness directly.

The only problem is that we do not have access to the underlying distribution. But because this is a supervised learning task, we do have access to many independent draws from the underlying distribution: the training data! We can simply use samples from the training data as random draws from $$D_{\text{data}}$$. This brings us to the variant of expected gradients used in , which we again visualize in three parts: $$\frac{1}{k} \sum_{j=1}^k \underbrace{(x_i - x’^j_i) \times \frac{\delta f(\text{ } \overbrace{x’^j + \alpha^{j} (x - x’^j)}^{\text{(1): Interpolated Image}} \text{ })}{\delta x_i}}_{\text{ (2): Gradients at Interpolation}} = \overbrace{\hat{\phi_i}^{EG}(f, x, k; D_{\text{data}})} ^{\text{(3): Cumulative Gradients up to }\alpha}$$

In (4) we again plot the sum of the importance scores over pixels. As mentioned in the original integrated gradients paper, all path methods, including expected gradients, satisfy the completeness axiom. We can definitely see that completeness is harder to satisfy when we integrate over both a path and a distribution: that is, with the same number of samples, expected gradients doesn’t converge as quickly as integrated gradients does. Whether or not this is an acceptable price to pay to avoid color-blindness in attributions seems subjective.

## Comparing Saliency Methods

So we now have many different choices for a baseline. How do we choose which one we should use? The different choices of distributions and constant baselines have different theoretical motivations and practical concerns. Do we have any way of comparing the different baselines? In this section, we will touch on several different ideas about how to compare interpretability methods. This section is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of all of the existing evaluation metrics, but is instead meant to emphasize that evaluating interpretability methods remains a difficult problem.

### The Dangers of Qualitative Assessment

One naive way to evaluate our baselines is to look at the saliency maps they produce and see which ones best highlight the object in the image. From our earlier figures, it does seem like using $$D_{\text{data}}$$ produces reasonable results, as does using a gaussian baseline or the blurred baseline. But is visual inspection really a good way judge our baselines? For one thing, we’ve only presented four images from the test set here. We would need to conduct user studies on a much larger scale with more images from the test set to be confident in our results. But even with large-scale user studies, qualitative assessment of saliency maps has other drawbacks.

When we rely on qualitative assessment, we are assuming that humans know what an “accurate” saliency map is. When we look at saliency maps on data like ImageNet, we often check whether or not the saliency map highlights the object that we see as representing the true class in the image. We make an assumption between the data and the label, and then further assume that a good saliency map should reflect that assumption. But doing so has no real justification. Consider the figure below, which compares two saliency methods on a network that gets above 99% accuracy on (an altered version of) MNIST. The first saliency method is just an edge detector plus gaussian smoothing, while the second saliency method is expected gradients using the training data as a distribution. Edge detection better reflects what we humans think is the relationship between the image and the label.

Unfortunately, the edge detection method here does not highlight what the network has learned. This dataset is a variant of decoy MNIST, in which the top left corner of the image has been altered to directly encode the image’s class . That is, the intensity of the top left corner of each image has been altered to be $$255 \times \frac{y}{9}$$ where $$y$$ is the class the image belongs to. We can verify by removing this patch in the test set that the network heavily relies on it to make predictions, which is what the expected gradients saliency maps show.

This is obviously a contrived example. Nonetheless, the fact that visual assessment is not necessarily a useful way to evaluate saliency maps and attribution methods has been extensively discussed in recent literature, with many proposed qualitative tests as replacements . At the heart of the issue is that we don’t have ground truth explanations: we are trying to evaluate which methods best explain our network without actually knowing what our networks are doing.

### Top K Ablation Tests

One simple way to evaluate the importance scores that expected/integrated gradients produces is to see whether ablating the top k features as ranked by their importance decreases the predicted output logit. In the figure below, we ablate either by mean-imputation or by replacing each pixel by its gaussian-blurred counter-part (Mean Top K and Blur Top K in the plot). We generate pixel importances for 1000 different correctly classified test-set images using each of the baselines proposed above For the blur baseline and the blur ablation test, we use $$\sigma = 20$$. For the gaussian baseline, we use $$\sigma = 1$$. These choices are somewhat arbitrary - a more comprehensive evaluation would compare across many values of $$\sigma$$. . As a control, we also include ranking features randomly (Random Noise in the plot).

We plot, as a fraction of the original logit, the output logit of the network at the true class. That is, suppose the original image is a goldfinch and the network predicts the goldfinch class correctly with 95% confidence. If the confidence of class goldfinch drops to 60% after ablating the top 10% of pixels as ranked by feature importance, then we plot a curve that goes through the points $$(0.0, 0.95)$$ and $$(0.1, 0.6)$$. The baseline choice that best highlights which pixels the network should exhibit the fastest drop in logit magnitude, because it highlights the pixels that most increase the confidence of the network. That is, the lower the curve, the better the baseline.

### Mass Center Ablation Tests

One problem with ablating the top k features in an image is related to an issue we already brought up: feature correlation. No matter how we ablate a pixel, that pixel’s neighbors provide a lot of information about the pixel’s original value. With this in mind, one could argue that progressively ablating pixels one by one is a rather meaningless thing to do. Can we instead perform ablations with feature correlation in mind?

One straightforward way to do this is simply compute the center of mass of the saliency map, and ablate a boxed region centered on the center of mass. This tests whether or not the saliency map is generally highlighting an important region in the image. We plot replacing the boxed region around the saliency map using mean-imputation and blurring below as well (Mean Center and Blur Center, respectively). As a control, we compare against a saliency map generated from random gaussian noise (Random Noise in the plot).

The ablation tests seem to indicate some interesting trends. All methods do similarly on the mass center ablation tests, and only slightly better than random noise. This may be because the object of interest generally lies in the center of the image - it isn’t hard for random noise to be centered at the image. In contrast, using the training data or a uniform distribution seems to do quite well on the top-k ablation tests. Interestingly, the blur baseline inspired by also does quite well on the top k baseline tests, especially when we ablate pixels by blurring them! Would the uniform baseline do better if you ablate the image with uniform random noise? Perhaps the training distribution baseline would do even better if you ablate an image by progressively replacing it with a different image. We leave these experiments as future work, as there is a more pressing question we need to discuss.

### The Pitfalls of Ablation Tests

Can we really trust the ablations tests presented above? We ran each method with 500 samples. Constant baselines tend to not need as many samples to converge as baselines over distributions. How do we fairly compare between baselines that have different computational costs? Valuable but computationally-intensive future work would be comparing not only across baselines but also across number of samples drawn, and for the blur and gaussian baselines, the parameter $$\sigma$$. As mentioned above, we have defined many notions of missingness other than mean-imputation or blurring: more extensive comparisons would also compare all of our baselines across all of the corresponding notions of missing data.

But even with all of these added comparisons, do ablation tests really provide a well-founded metric to judge attribution methods? The authors of argue against ablation tests. They point out that once we artificially ablate pixels an image, we have created inputs that do not come from the original data distribution. Our trained model has never seen such inputs. Why should we expect to extract any reasonable information from evaluating our model on them?

On the other hand, integrated gradients and expected gradients rely on presenting interpolated images to your model, and unless you make some strange convexity assumption, those interpolated images don’t belong to the original training distribution either. In general, whether or not users should present their models with inputs that don’t belong to the original training distribution is a subject of ongoing debate . Nonetheless, the point raised in is still an important one: “it is unclear whether the degradation in model performance comes from the distribution shift or because the features that were removed are truly informative.”

### Alternative Evaluation Metrics

So what about other evaluation metrics proposed in recent literature? In , Hooker et al. propose a variant of an ablation test where we first ablate pixels in the training and test sets. Then, we re-train a model on the ablated data and measure by how much the test-set performance degrades. This approach has the advantage of better capturing whether or not the saliency method highlights the pixels that are most important for predicting the output class. Unfortunately, it has the drawback of needing to re-train the model several times. This metric may also get confused by feature correlation.

Consider the following scenario: our dataset has two features that are highly correlated. We train a model which learns to only use the first feature, and completely ignore the second feature. A feature attribution method might accurately reveal what the model is doing: it’s only using the first feature. We could ablate that feature in the dataset, re-train the model and get similar performance because similar information is stored in the second feature. We might conclude that our feature attribution method is lousy - is it? This problem fits into a larger discussion about whether or not your attribution method should be “true to the model” or “true to the data” which has been discussed in several recent articles .

In , the authors propose several sanity checks that saliency methods should pass. One is the “Model Parameter Randomization Test”. Essentially, it states that a feature attribution method should produce different attributions when evaluated on a trained model (assumedly a trained model that performs well) and a randomly initialized model. This metric is intuitive: if a feature attribution method produces similar attributions for random and trained models, is the feature attribution really using information from the model? It might just be relying entirely on information from the input image.

But consider the following figure, which is another (modified) version of MNIST. We’ve generated expected gradients attributions using the training distribution as a baseline for two different networks. One of the networks is a trained model that gets over 99% accuracy on the test set. The other network is a randomly initialized model that doesn’t do better than random guessing. Should we now conclude that expected gradients is an unreliable method?

Of course, we modified MNIST in this example specifically so that expected gradients attributions of an accurate model would look exactly like those of a randomly initialized model. The way we did this is similar to the decoy MNIST dataset, except instead of the top left corner encoding the class label, we randomly scattered noise througout each training and test image where the intensity of the noise encodes the true class label. Generally, you would run these kinds of saliency method sanity checks on un-modified data.

But the truth is, even for natural images, we don’t actually know what an accurate model’s saliency maps should look like. Different architectures trained on ImageNet can all get good performance and have very different saliency maps. Can we really say that trained models should have saliency maps that don’t look like saliency maps generated on randomly initialized models? That isn’t to say that the model randomization test doesn’t have merit: it does reveal interesting things about what saliency methods are are doing. It just doesn’t tell the whole story.

As we mentioned above, there’s a variety of metrics that have been proposed to evaluate interpretability methods. There are many metrics we do not explicitly discuss here . Each proposed metric comes with their various pros and cons. In general, evaluating supervised models is somewhat straightforward: we set aside a test-set and use it to evaluate how well our model performs on unseen data. Evaluating explanations is hard: we don’t know what our model is doing and have no ground truth to compare against.

## Conclusion

So what should be done? We have many baselines and no conclusion about which one is the “best.” Although we don’t provide extensive quantitative results comparing each baseline, we do provide a foundation for understanding them further. At the heart of each baseline is an assumption about missingness in our model and the distribution of our data. In this article, we shed light on some of those assumptions, and their impact on the corresponding path attribution. We lay groundwork for future discussion about baselines in the context of path attributions, and more generally about the relationship between representations of missingness and how we explain machine learning models.

## Related Methods

This work focuses on a specific interpretability method: integrated gradients and its extension, expected gradients. We refer to these methods as path attribution methods because they integrate importances over a path. However, path attribution methods represent only a tiny fraction of existing interpretability methods. We focus on them here both because they are amenable to interesting visualizations, and because they provide a springboard for talking about missingness. We briefly cited several other methods at the beginning of this article. Many of those methods use some notion of baseline and have contributed to the discussion surrounding baseline choices.

In , Fong and Vedaldi propose a model-agnostic method to explain neural networks that is based on learning the minimal deletion to an image that changes the model prediction. In section 4, their work contains an extended discussion on how to represent deletions: that is, how to represent missing pixels. They argue that one natural way to delete pixels in an image is to blur them. This discussion inspired the blurred baseline that we presented in our article. They also discuss how noise can be used to represent missingness, which was part of the inspiration for our uniform and gaussian noise baselines.

In , Shrikumar et al. propose a feature attribution method called deepLIFT. It assigns importance scores to features by propagating scores from the output of the model back to the input. Similar to integrated gradients, deepLIFT also defines importance scores relative to a baseline, which they call the “reference”. Their paper has an extended discussion on why explaining relative to a baseline is meaningful. They also discuss a few different baselines, including “using a blurred version of the original image”.

The list of other related methods that we didn’t discuss in this article goes on: SHAP and DeepSHAP , layer-wise relevance propagation , LIME , RISE and Grad-CAM among others. Many methods for explaining machine learning models define some notion of baseline or missingness, because missingness and explanations are closely related. When we explain a model, we often want to know which features, when missing, would most change model output. But in order to do so, we need to define what missing means because most machine learning models cannot handle arbitrary patterns of missing inputs. This article does not discuss all of the nuances presented alongside each existing method, but it is important to note that these methods were points of inspiration for a larger discussion about missingness.

### Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [R35 GM 128638, and R01 NIA AG 061132], the American Cancer Society [127332-RSG-15-097-01-TBG], and the National Science Foundation [CAREER DBI-1552309]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors, and does not necessarily represent the official views of these funding agencies. We would also like to thank Joseph D. Janizek and Hugh Chen for their feedback. Finally, we would like to thank our three reviewers, who helped us make substatial improvements to the original submission.

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### Reuse

Diagrams and text are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 with the source available on GitHub, unless noted otherwise. The figures that have been reused from other sources don’t fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: “Figure from …”.

### Citation

Sturmfels, et al., "Visualizing the Impact of Feature Attribution Baselines", Distill, 2020.
@article{sturmfels2020visualizing,
}