Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization

We propose a technique for producing "visual explanations" for decisions from a large class of CNN-based models, making them more transparent. Our approach - Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses the gradients of any target concept, flowing into the final convolutional layer to produce a coarse localization map highlighting the important regions in the image for predicting the concept. Unlike previous approaches, GradCAM is applicable to a wide variety of CNN model-families: (1) CNNs with fully-connected layers (e.g. VGG), (2) CNNs used for structured outputs (e.g. captioning), (3) CNNs used in tasks with multimodal inputs (e.g. VQA) or reinforcement learning, without any architectural changes or re-training. We combine GradCAM with fine-grained visualizations to create a high-resolution class-discriminative visualization and apply it to off-the-shelf image classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA) models, including ResNet-based architectures. In the context of image classification models, our visualizations (a) lend insights into their failure modes (showing that seemingly unreasonable predictions have reasonable explanations), (b) are robust to adversarial images, (c) outperform previous methods on weakly-supervised localization, (d) are more faithful to the underlying model and (e) help achieve generalization by identifying dataset bias. For captioning and VQA, our visualizations show that even non-attention based models can localize inputs. Finally, we conduct human studies to measure if GradCAM explanations help users establish trust in predictions from deep networks and show that GradCAM helps untrained users successfully discern a "stronger" deep network from a "weaker" one. Our code is available at https://github.com/ramprs/grad-cam. A demo and a video of the demo can be found at http://gradcam.cloudcv.org and youtu.be/COjUB9Izk6E.

Learning Cooperative Visual Dialog Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learning

We introduce the first goal-driven training for visual question answering and dialog agents. Specifically, we pose a cooperative 'image guessing' game between two agents -- Qbot and Abot -- who communicate in natural language dialog so that Qbot can select an unseen image from a lineup of images. We use deep reinforcement learning (RL) to learn the policies of these agents end-to-end -- from pixels to multi-agent multi-round dialog to game reward. We demonstrate two experimental results. First, as a 'sanity check' demonstration of pure RL (from scratch), we show results on a synthetic world, where the agents communicate in ungrounded vocabulary, i.e., symbols with no pre-specified meanings (X, Y, Z). We find that two bots invent their own communication protocol and start using certain symbols to ask/answer about certain visual attributes (shape/color/style). Thus, we demonstrate the emergence of grounded language and communication among 'visual' dialog agents with no human supervision. Second, we conduct large-scale real-image experiments on the VisDial dataset, where we pretrain with supervised dialog data and show that the RL 'fine-tuned' agents significantly outperform SL agents. Interestingly, the RL Qbot learns to ask questions that Abot is good at, ultimately resulting in more informative dialog and a better team.

Grad-CAM: Why did you say that?

We propose a technique for making Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models more transparent by visualizing input regions that are 'important' for predictions -- or visual explanations. Our approach, called Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses class-specific gradient information to localize important regions. These localizations are combined with existing pixel-space visualizations to create a novel high-resolution and class-discriminative visualization called Guided Grad-CAM. These methods help better understand CNN-based models, including image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) models. We evaluate our visual explanations by measuring their ability to discriminate between classes, to inspire trust in humans, and their correlation with occlusion maps. Grad-CAM provides a new way to understand CNN-based models. We have released code, an online demo hosted on CloudCV, and a full version of this extended abstract.

Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?

We conduct large-scale studies on `human attention' in Visual Question Answering (VQA) to understand where humans choose to look to answer questions about images. We design and test multiple game-inspired novel attention-annotation interfaces that require the subject to sharpen regions of a blurred image to answer a question. Thus, we introduce the VQA-HAT (Human ATtention) dataset. We evaluate attention maps generated by state-of-the-art VQA models against human attention both qualitatively (via visualizations) and quantitatively (via rank-order correlation). Overall, our experiments show that current attention models in VQA do not seem to be looking at the same regions as humans.

Elimination of Specular reflection and Identification of ROI: The First Step in Automated Detection of Cervical Cancer using Digital Colposcopy

Cervical Cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in women worldwide. Most cases of cervical cancer can be prevented through screening programs aimed at detecting precancerous lesions. During Digital Colposcopy, Specular Reflections (SR) appear as bright spots heavily saturated with white light. These occur due to the presence of moisture on the uneven cervix surface, which act like mirrors reflecting light from the illumination source. Apart from camouflaging the actual features, the SR also affects subsequent segmentation routines and hence must be removed. Our novel technique eliminates the SR and makes the colposcopic images (cervigram) ready for segmentation algorithms. The cervix region occupies about half of the cervigram image. Other parts of the image contain irrelevant information, such as equipment, frames, text and non-cervix tissues. This irrelevant information can confuse automatic identification of the tissues within the cervix. The first step is, therefore, focusing on the cervical borders, so that we have a geometric boundary on the relevant image area. We have proposed a type of modified kmeans clustering algorithm to evaluate the region of interest.

Preprocessing for Automating Early Detection of Cervical Cancer

Uterine Cervical Cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in women worldwide. Most cases of cervical cancer can be prevented through screening programs aimed at detecting precancerous lesions. During Digital Colposcopy, colposcopic images or cervigrams are acquired in raw form. They contain specular reflections which appear as bright spots heavily saturated with white light and occur due to the presence of moisture on the uneven cervix surface and. The cervix region occupies about half of the raw cervigram image. Other parts of the image contain irrelevant information, such as equipment, frames, text and non-cervix tissues. This irrelevant information can confuse automatic identification of the tissues within the cervix. Therefore we focus on the cervical borders, so that we have a geometric boundary on the relevant image area. Our novel technique eliminates the SR, identifies the region of interest and makes the cervigram ready for segmentation algorithms.

Preprocessing: A Step in Automating Early Detection of Cervical Cancer

This paper has been withdrawn