Papers › Q-SENN: Quantized Self-Explaining Neural Networks

Q-SENN: Quantized Self-Explaining Neural Networks

21 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.13839archive 2025-07-28

Thomas Norrenbrock, Marco Rudolph, Bodo Rosenhahn

Explanations in Computer Vision are often desired, but most Deep Neural Networks can only provide saliency maps with questionable faithfulness. Self-Explaining Neural Networks (SENN) extract interpretable concepts with fidelity, diversity, and grounding to combine them linearly for decision-making. While they can explain what was recognized, initial realizations lack accuracy and general applicability. We propose the Quantized-Self-Explaining Neural Network Q-SENN. Q-SENN satisfies or exceeds the desiderata of SENN while being applicable to more complex datasets and maintaining most or all of the accuracy of an uninterpretable baseline model, out-performing previous work in all considered metrics. Q-SENN describes the relationship between every class and feature as either positive, negative or neutral instead of an arbitrary number of possible relations, enforcing more binary human-friendly features. Since every class is assigned just 5 interpretable features on average, Q-SENN shows convincing local and global interpretability. Additionally, we propose a feature alignment method, capable of aligning learned features with human language-based concepts without additional supervision. Thus, what is learned can be more easily verbalized. The code is published: https://github.com/ThomasNorr/Q-SENN

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DiversityImage ClassificationInterpretable Machine Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Interpretable Machine Learning CUB-200-2011 Q-SENN Top 1 Accuracy 85.9 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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