🦊 Xplique (pronounced \ɛks.plik\) is a Python toolkit dedicated to explainability, currently based on Tensorflow. The goal of this library is to gather the state of the art of Explainable AI to help you understand your complex neural network models.
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Attributions · Concept · Feature Visualization · Metrics

The library is composed of several modules, the Attributions Methods module implements various methods (e.g Saliency, Grad-CAM, Integrated-Gradients...), with explanations, examples and links to official papers. The Feature Visualization module allows to see how neural networks build their understanding of images by finding inputs that maximize neurons, channels, layers or compositions of these elements. The Concepts module allows you to extract human concepts from a model and to test their usefulness with respect to a class. Finally, the Metrics module covers the current metrics used in explainability. Used in conjunction with the Attribution Methods module, it allows you to test the different methods or evaluate the explanations of a model.

📚 Table of contents

• 📚 Table of contents
• 🔥 Tutorials
• 🚀 Quick Start
• 📦 What's Included
• 📞 Callable
• 👍 Contributing
• 👀 See Also
• 🙏 Acknowledgments
• 👨‍🎓 Creator
• 🗞️ Citation
• 📝 License

🔥 Tutorials

We propose some Hands-on tutorials to get familiar with the library and its api:

• Attribution Methods: Getting started

• Attribution Methods: Sanity checks paper
• Attribution Methods: Tabular data and Regression
• Attribution Methods: Metrics

• Concepts Methods: Testing with Concept Activation Vectors

• Feature Visualization: Getting started

You can find a certain number of other practical tutorials just here. This section is actively developed and more contents will be included. We will try to cover all the possible usage of the library, feel free to contact us if you have any suggestions or recommandations towards tutorials you would like to see.

🚀 Quick Start

Xplique requires a version of python higher than 3.6 and several libraries including Tensorflow and Numpy. Installation can be done using Pypi:

pip install xplique

Now that Xplique is installed, here are 4 basic examples of what you can do with the available modules.

Attributions Methods

let's start with a simple example, by computing Grad-CAM for several images (or a complete dataset) on a trained model.

from xplique.attributions import GradCAM

# load images, labels and model
# ...

explainer = GradCAM(model)
explanations = explainer.explain(images, labels)
# or just `explainer(images, labels)`

All attributions methods share a common API. You can find out more about it here.

Attributions Metrics

In order to measure if the explanations provided by our method are faithful (it reflects well the functioning of the model) we can use a fidelity metric such as Deletion

from xplique.attributions import GradCAM
from xplique.metrics import Deletion

# load images, labels and model
# ...

explainer = GradCAM(model)
explanations = explainer(inputs, labels)
metric = Deletion(model, inputs, labels)

score_grad_cam = metric(explanations)

All attributions metrics share a common API. You can find out more about it here

Concepts Extraction

Concerning the concept-based methods, we can for example extract a concept vector from a layer of a model. In order to do this, we use two datasets, one containing inputs containing the concept: positive_samples, the other containing other entries which do not contain the concept: negative_samples.

from xplique.concepts import Cav

# load a model, samples that contain a concept
# (positive) and samples who don't (negative)
# ...

extractor = Cav(model, 'mixed3')
concept_vector = extractor(positive_samples,
                           negative_samples)

More information on CAV here and on TCAV here.

Feature Visualization

Finally, in order to find an image that maximizes a neuron and at the same time a layer, we build two objectives that we combine together. We then call the optimizer which returns our images

from xplique.features_visualizations import Objective
from xplique.features_visualizations import optimize

# load a model...

neuron_obj = Objective.neuron(model, "logits", 200)
channel_obj = Objective.layer(model, "mixed3", 10)

obj = neuron_obj + 2.0 * channel_obj
images, obj_names = optimize(obj)

Want to know more ? Check the Feature Viz documentation

📦 What's Included

All the attributions method presented below handle both Classification and Regression tasks.

Attribution Method	Type of Model	Source	Tabular Data	Images	Time-Series	Tutorial
Deconvolution	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Grad-CAM	TF	Paper		✔
Grad-CAM++	TF	Paper		✔
Gradient Input	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Guided Backprop	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Integrated Gradients	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Kernel SHAP	Callable*	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Lime	Callable*	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Occlusion	Callable*	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Rise	Callable*	Paper	WIP	✔
Saliency	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
SmoothGrad	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
SquareGrad	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
VarGrad	TF	Paper	✔	✔	WIP
Sobol Attribution	TF	Paper		✔
Hsic Attribution	TF	Paper		✔

• : See the Callable documentation

Attribution Metrics	Type of Model	Property	Source
MuFidelity	TF	Fidelity	Paper
Deletion	TF	Fidelity	Paper
Insertion	TF	Fidelity	Paper
Average Stability	TF	Stability	Paper
MeGe	TF	Representativity	Paper
ReCo	TF	Consistency	Paper
(WIP) e-robustness

Concepts method	Type of Model	Source
Concept Activation Vector (CAV)	TF	Paper
Testing CAV (TCAV)	TF	Paper
(WIP) Robust TCAV
(WIP) Automatic Concept Extraction (ACE)

Feature Visualization (Paper)	Type of Model	Details
Neurons	TF	Optimizes for specific neurons
Layer	TF	Optimizes for specific layers
Channel	TF	Optimizes for specific channels
Direction	TF	Optimizes for specific vector
Fourrier Preconditioning	TF	Optimize in Fourier basis (see preconditioning)
Objective combination	TF	Allows to combine objectives

methods with TF need a Tensorflow model.

👍 Contributing

Feel free to propose your ideas or come and contribute with us on the Xplique toolbox! We have a specific document where we describe in a simple way how to make your first pull request: just here.

👀 See Also

This library is one approach of many to explain your model. We don't expect it to be the perfect solution; we create it to explore one point in the space of possibilities.

Other tools to explain your model include:

• Lucid the wonderful library specialized in feature visualization from OpenAI.
• Captum the Pytorch library for Interpretability research
• Tf-explain that implement multiples attribution methods and propose callbacks API for tensorflow.
• Alibi Explain for model inspection and interpretation
• SHAP a very popular library to compute local explanations using the classic Shapley values from game theory and their related extensions

To learn more about Explainable AI in general, see:

• Interpretable Machine Learning by Christophe Molnar.
• Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution by Been Kim.
• Explaining ML Predictions: State-of-the-art, Challenges, and Opportunities by Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julius Adebayo and Sameer Singh.
• A Roadmap for the Rigorous Science of Interpretability by Finale Doshi-Velez.
• DEEL White paper a summary of the DEEL team on the challenges of certifiable AI and the role of explainability for this purpose

🙏 Acknowledgments

This project received funding from the French ”Investing for the Future – PIA3” program within the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute (ANITI). The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the DEEL project.

👨‍🎓 Creators

This library was started as a side-project by Thomas FEL who is currently a graduate student at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute under the direction of Thomas SERRE. His thesis work focuses on explainability for deep neural networks.

He then received help from some members of the DEEL team to enhance the library namely from Lucas Hervier and Antonin Poché.

🗞️ Citation

If you use Xplique as part of your workflow in a scientific publication, please consider citing the 🗞️ Xplique official paper:

@article{fel2022xplique,
  title={Xplique: A Deep Learning Explainability Toolbox},
  author={Fel, Thomas and Hervier, Lucas and Vigouroux, David and Poche, Antonin and Plakoo, Justin and Cadene, Remi and Chalvidal, Mathieu and Colin, Julien and Boissin, Thibaut and Bethune, Louis and Picard, Agustin and Nicodeme, Claire 
          and Gardes, Laurent and Flandin, Gregory and Serre, Thomas},
  journal={Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Computer Vision (CVPR)},
  year={2022}
}

📝 License

The package is released under MIT license.