Papers › Embedded Encoder-Decoder in Convolutional Networks Towards Explainable AI

Embedded Encoder-Decoder in Convolutional Networks Towards Explainable AI

19 Jun 2020arXiv:2007.06712archive 2025-07-28

Amirhossein Tavanaei

Understanding intermediate layers of a deep learning model and discovering the driving features of stimuli have attracted much interest, recently. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) provides a new way to open an AI black box and makes a transparent and interpretable decision. This paper proposes a new explainable convolutional neural network (XCNN) which represents important and driving visual features of stimuli in an end-to-end model architecture. This network employs encoder-decoder neural networks in a CNN architecture to represent regions of interest in an image based on its category. The proposed model is trained without localization labels and generates a heat-map as part of the network architecture without extra post-processing steps. The experimental results on the CIFAR-10, Tiny ImageNet, and MNIST datasets showed the success of our algorithm (XCNN) to make CNNs explainable. Based on visual assessment, the proposed model outperforms the current algorithms in class-specific feature representation and interpretable heatmap generation while providing a simple and flexible network architecture. The initial success of this approach warrants further study to enhance weakly supervised localization and semantic segmentation in explainable frameworks.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

tavanaei/ExplainableCNN officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

DecoderExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Explainable artificial intelligenceSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Heatmap

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections