A Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm to Evolving Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations for Deep Neural Networks in Image Classification

Deep convolutional neural networks have become a dominant solution for numerous image classification tasks. However, a main criticism is the poor explainability due to the black-box characteristic, which hurdles the extensive usage of deep convolutional neural networks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new evolutionary multi-objective based method, which aims to explain the behaviours of deep convolutional neural networks by evolving local explanations on specific images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evolutionary multi-objective method to evolve local explanations. The proposed method is model-agnostic, i.e. it is applicable to explain any deep convolutional neural networks. ImageNet is used to examine the effectiveness of the proposed method. Three well-known deep convolutional neural networks -VGGNet, ResNet, and MobileNet, are chosen to demonstrate the modelagnostic characteristic. Based on the experimental results, it can be observed that the local explanations are understandable to end-users, who need to check the sensibility of the evolved explanations to decide whether to trust the predictions made by the deep convolutional neural networks. Furthermore, the local explanations evolved by the proposed method improves the confidence of deep convolutional neural networks making the predictions. Lastly, the pareto front and convergence analyses indicate that the proposed method can form a good set of nondominated solutions.