Saliency methods provide post-hoc model interpretation by attributing input features to the model outputs. Current methods mainly achieve this using a single input sample, thereby failing to answer input-independent inquiries about the model. We also show that input-specific saliency mapping is intrinsically susceptible to misleading feature attribution. Current attempts to use `general' input features for model interpretation assume  access to a dataset containing  those features, which biases the interpretation.  Addressing the gap, we introduce a new perspective of input-agnostic saliency mapping that computationally estimates the high-level  features attributed by the model to its outputs. These features are geometrically correlated, and are computed by accumulating model's gradient information with respect to an unrestricted data distribution. To compute these features, we nudge independent data points over the model loss surface towards the local minima associated by a human-understandable concept, e.g., class label for classifiers. With a systematic projection, scaling and refinement process, this information is transformed into an interpretable visualization without compromising its model-fidelity. The visualization serves as a stand-alone qualitative interpretation. With an extensive evaluation, we not only demonstrate successful visualizations for a variety of concepts for large-scale models, but also showcase an interesting utility of this new form of saliency mapping by identifying backdoor signatures in compromised classifiers.

Rethinking interpretation: Input-agnostic saliency mapping of deep visual classifiers

Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) has managed to match or surpass the performance of supervised learning in image and video classification. However, it is still largely unknown if the nature of the representations induced by the two learning paradigms is similar. We investigate this under the lens of adversarial robustness. Our analysis of the problem reveals that CSL has intrinsically higher sensitivity to perturbations over supervised learning. We identify the uniform distribution of data representation over a unit hypersphere in the CSL representation space as the key contributor to this phenomenon. We establish that this is a result of the presence of false negative pairs in the training process, which increases model sensitivity to input perturbations. Our finding is supported by extensive experiments for image and video classification using adversarial perturbations and other input corruptions. We devise a strategy to detect and remove false negative pairs that is simple, yet effective in improving model robustness with CSL training. We close up to 68% of the robustness gap between CSL and its supervised counterpart. Finally, we contribute to adversarial learning by incorporating our method in CSL. We demonstrate an average gain of about 5% over two different state-of-the-art methods in this domain. 

Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning Leads to Higher Adversarial Susceptibility

Path attribution methods are a popular tool to interpret a visual model's prediction on an input. They integrate model gradients for the input features over a path defined between the input and a reference, thereby satisfying certain desirable theoretical properties. However, their reliability hinges on the choice of the reference. Moreover, they do not exhibit weak dependence on the input, which leads to counter-intuitive feature attribution mapping. We show that path-based attribution can account for the weak dependence property by choosing the reference from the local distribution of the input. We devise a method to identify the local input distribution and propose a technique to stochastically integrate the model gradients over the paths defined by the references sampled from that distribution. Our local path integration (LPI) method is found to consistently outperform existing path attribution techniques when evaluated on deep visual models. Contributing to the ongoing search of reliable evaluation metrics for the interpretation methods, we also introduce DiffID metric that uses the relative difference between insertion and deletion games to alleviate the distribution shift problem faced by existing metrics.

Local Path Integration for Attribution

Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models are the bedrock of contemporary point cloud processing. However, their complex network architectures obscure the source of their strength. We first develop an “abstraction and refinement” (ABS-REF) view for the neural modeling of point clouds. This view elucidates that whereas the early models focused on the ABS stage, the more recent techniques devise sophisticated REF stages to attain performance advantage in point cloud processing. We then borrow the concept of “positional encoding” from  transformer literature, and propose a High-dimensional Positional Encoding (HPE) module, which can be  readily deployed to MLP based architectures. We leverage our module to develop a suite of HPENet, which are MLP networks that follow ABS-REF paradigm, albeit with a sophisticated HPE based REF stage. The developed technique is extensively evaluated for 3D object classification, object part segmentation, semantic segmentation and object detection. We establish new state-of-the-art results of 87.6 mAcc on ScanObjectNN for object classification, and 85.5 class mIoU on ShapeNetPart for object part segmentation, and 72.7 and 78.7 mIoU on Area-5 and 6-fold experiments with S3DIS for semantic segmentation. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/zouyanmei/HPENet.

Improved MLP Point Cloud Processing with High-Dimensional Positional Encoding

Posters & Demos III

poster

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

Posters & Demos II

Main Track - Computer Vision

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Naveed Akhtar

4

7

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Rethinking interpretation: Input-agnostic saliency mapping of deep visual classifiers

Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning Leads to Higher Adversarial Susceptibility

Local Path Integration for Attribution

Improved MLP Point Cloud Processing with High-Dimensional Positional Encoding

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