CAPE: CAM as a Probabilistic Ensemble for Enhanced DNN Interpretation
Authors: Townim Faisal Chowdhury, Kewen Liao, Vu Minh Hieu Phan, Minh-Son To, Yutong Xie, Kevin Hung, David Ross, Anton van den Hengel, Johan W. Verjans, Zhibin Liao

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used for visual classification tasks but their complex computation process and black-box nature hinder decision transparency and interpretability. Class activation maps (CAMs) and recent variants provide ways to visually explain the DNN decision-making process by displaying 'attention' heatmaps of the DNNs. Nevertheless the CAM explanation only offers relative attention information that is on an attention heatmap we can interpret which image region is more or less important than the others. However these regions cannot be meaningfully compared across classes and the contribution of each region to the model's class prediction is not revealed. To address these challenges that ultimately lead to better DNN Interpretation in this paper we propose CAPE a novel reformulation of CAM that provides a unified and probabilistically meaningful assessment of the contributions of image regions. We quantitatively and qualitatively compare CAPE with state-of-the-art CAM methods on CUB and ImageNet benchmark datasets to demonstrate enhanced interpretability. We also test on a cytology imaging dataset depicting a challenging Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML) diagnosis problem. Code is available at:https://github.com/AIML-MED/CAPE.