Papers › Take 5: Interpretable Image Classification with a Handful of Features
Take 5: Interpretable Image Classification with a Handful of Features
Thomas Norrenbrock, Marco Rudolph, Bodo Rosenhahn
Deep Neural Networks use thousands of mostly incomprehensible features to identify a single class, a decision no human can follow. We propose an interpretable sparse and low dimensional final decision layer in a deep neural network with measurable aspects of interpretability and demonstrate it on fine-grained image classification. We argue that a human can only understand the decision of a machine learning model, if the features are interpretable and only very few of them are used for a single decision. For that matter, the final layer has to be sparse and, to make interpreting the features feasible, low dimensional. We call a model with a Sparse Low-Dimensional Decision SLDD-Model. We show that a SLDD-Model is easier to interpret locally and globally than a dense high-dimensional decision layer while being able to maintain competitive accuracy. Additionally, we propose a loss function that improves a model's feature diversity and accuracy. Our more interpretable SLDD-Model only uses 5 out of just 50 features per class, while maintaining 97% to 100% of the accuracy on four common benchmark datasets compared to the baseline model with 2048 features.
Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interpretable Machine Learning | CUB-200-2011 | SLDD-Model | Top 1 Accuracy | 85.7 | #2 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
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