BIM: Towards Quantitative Evaluation of Interpretability Methods with Ground Truth

Interpretability is rising as an important area of research in machine learning for safer deployment of machine learning systems. Despite active developments, quantitative evaluation of interpretability methods remains a challenge due to the lack of ground truth; we do not know which features or concepts are important to a classification model. In this work, we propose the Benchmark Interpretability Methods (BIM) framework, which offers a set of tools to quantitatively compare a model's ground truth to the output of interpretability methods. Our contributions are: 1) a carefully crafted dataset and models trained with known ground truth and 2) three complementary metrics to evaluate interpretability methods. Our metrics focus on identifying false positives---features that are incorrectly attributed as important. These metrics compare how methods perform across models, across images, and per image. We open source the dataset, models, and metrics evaluated on many widely-used interpretability methods.