



@article {2370,
	title = {Interpreting Neural Networks Using Flip Points},
	year = {2019},
	month = {03/20/2019},
	abstract = {<p>Neural networks have been criticized for their lack of easy interpretation, which undermines confidence in their use for important applications. Here, we introduce a novel technique, interpreting a trained neural network by investigating its flip points. A flip point is any point that lies on the boundary between two output classes: e.g. for a neural network with a binary yes/no output, a flip point is any input that generates equal scores for \&quot;yes\&quot; and \&quot;no\&quot;. The flip point closest to a given input is of particular importance, and this point is the solution to a well-posed optimization problem. This paper gives an overview of the uses of flip points and how they are computed. Through results on standard datasets, we demonstrate how flip points can be used to provide detailed interpretation of the output produced by a neural network. Moreover, for a given input, flip points enable us to measure confidence in the correctness of outputs much more effectively than softmax score. They also identify influential features of the inputs, identify bias, and find changes in the input that change the output of the model. We show that distance between an input and the closest flip point identifies the most influential points in the training data. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and rank-revealing QR factorization (RR-QR), the set of directions from each training input to its closest flip point provides explanations of how a trained neural network processes an entire dataset: what features are most important for classification into a given class, which features are most responsible for particular misclassifications, how an adversary might fool the network, etc. Although we investigate flip points for neural networks, their usefulness is actually model-agnostic.</p>},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08789},
	author = {Roozbeh Yousefzadeh and Dianne P. O{\textquoteright}Leary}
}
@article {2454,
	title = {Investigating Decision Boundaries of Trained Neural Networks},
	year = {2019},
	month = {8/7/2019},
	abstract = {<p>Deep learning models have been the subject of study from various perspectives, for example, their training process, interpretation, generalization error, robustness to adversarial attacks, etc. A trained model is defined by its decision boundaries, and therefore, many of the studies about deep learning models speculate about the decision boundaries, and sometimes make simplifying assumptions about them. So far, finding exact points on the decision boundaries of trained deep models has been considered an intractable problem. Here, we compute exact points on the decision boundaries of these models and provide mathematical tools to investigate the surfaces that define the decision boundaries. Through numerical results, we confirm that some of the speculations about the decision boundaries are accurate, some of the computational methods can be improved, and some of the simplifying assumptions may be unreliable, for models with nonlinear activation functions. We advocate for verification of simplifying assumptions and approximation methods, wherever they are used. Finally, we demonstrate that the computational practices used for finding adversarial examples can be improved and computing the closest point on the decision boundary reveals the weakest vulnerability of a model against adversarial attack.</p>},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02802},
	author = {Roozbeh Yousefzadeh and Dianne P O{\textquoteright}Leary}
}
