Abstract
The growing importance of the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) field has led to the proposal of several methods for producing visual heatmaps of the classification decisions of deep learning models. However, visual explanations are not sufficient because different end-users have different backgrounds and preferences. Natural language explanations (NLEs) are inherently understandable by humans and, thus, can complement visual explanations. Therefore, we introduce a novel architecture based on multimodal Transformers to enable the generation of NLEs for image classification tasks. Contrary to the current literature, which models NLE generation as a supervised image captioning problem, we propose to learn to generate these textual explanations without their direct supervision, by starting from image captions and evolving to classification-relevant text. Preliminary experiments on a novel dataset where there is a clear demarcation between captions and NLEs show the potential of the approach and shed light on how it can be improved.
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This work was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the PhD grant “2020.07034.BD”.
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Rio-Torto, I., Cardoso, J.S., Teixeira, L.F. (2022). From Captions to Explanations: A Multimodal Transformer-based Architecture for Natural Language Explanation Generation. In: Pinho, A.J., Georgieva, P., Teixeira, L.F., Sánchez, J.A. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. IbPRIA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13256. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04881-4_5
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