Relative Attributing Propagation: Interpreting the Comparative Contributions of Individual Units in Deep Neural Networks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated superhuman performance in a variety of fields, there is an increasing interest in understanding the complex internal mechanisms of DNNs. In this paper, we propose Relative Attributing Propagation (RAP), which decomposes the output predictions of DNNs with a new perspective of separating the relevant (positive) and irrelevant (negative) attributions according to the relative influence between the layers. The relevance of each neuron is identified with respect to its degree of contribution, separated into positive and negative, while preserving the conservation rule. Considering the relevance assigned to neurons in terms of relative priority, RAP allows each neuron to be assigned with a bi-polar importance score concerning the output: from highly relevant to highly irrelevant. Therefore, our method makes it possible to interpret DNNs with much clearer and attentive visualizations of the separated attributions than the conventional explaining methods. To verify that the attributions propagated by RAP correctly account for each meaning, we utilize the evaluation metrics: (i) Outside-inside relevance ratio, (ii) Segmentation mIOU and (iii) Region perturbation. In all experiments and metrics, we present a sizable gap in comparison to the existing literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".