Evaluating Recurrent Neural Network Explanations Leila Arras1, Ahmed Osman1, Klaus-Robert Muller¨ 2;3;4, and Wojciech Samek1 1Machine Learning Group, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany 2Machine Learning Group, Technische Universitat¨ Berlin, Berlin, Germany 3Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea 4Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrucken,¨ Germany fleila.arras,
[email protected] Abstract a particular decision, i.e., when the input is a se- quence of words: which words are determinant Recently, several methods have been proposed for the final decision? This information is crucial to explain the predictions of recurrent neu- ral networks (RNNs), in particular of LSTMs. to unmask “Clever Hans” predictors (Lapuschkin The goal of these methods is to understand the et al., 2019), and to allow for transparency of the network’s decisions by assigning to each in- decision-making process (EU-GDPR, 2016). put variable, e.g., a word, a relevance indicat- Early works on explaining neural network pre- ing to which extent it contributed to a partic- dictions include Baehrens et al.(2010); Zeiler and ular prediction. In previous works, some of Fergus(2014); Simonyan et al.(2014); Springen- these methods were not yet compared to one berg et al.(2015); Bach et al.(2015); Alain and another, or were evaluated only qualitatively. We close this gap by systematically and quan- Bengio(2017), with several works focusing on ex- titatively comparing these methods in differ- plaining the decisions of convolutional neural net- ent settings, namely (1) a toy arithmetic task works (CNNs) for image recognition. More re- which we use as a sanity check, (2) a five-class cently, this topic found a growing interest within sentiment prediction of movie reviews, and be- NLP, amongst others to explain the decisions of sides (3) we explore the usefulness of word general CNN classifiers (Arras et al., 2017a; Ja- relevances to build sentence-level representa- covi et al., 2018), and more particularly to explain tions.