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Sobol Attribution Method

View colab tutorial | View source | 📰 Paper

The Sobol attribution method from Fel, Cadène & al.1 is an attribution method grounded in Sensitivity Analysis. Beyond modeling the individual contributions of image regions, Sobol indices provide efficient way to capture higher-order interactions between image regions and their contributions to a neural network’s prediction through the lens of variance.

Quote

The total Sobol index \(ST_i\) which measures the contribution of the variable \(X_i\) as well as its interactions of any order with any other input variables to the model output variance.

-- Look at the Variance! Efficient Black-box Explanations with Sobol-based Sensitivity Analysis (2021)1

More precisely, the attribution score \(\phi_i\) for an input variable \(x_i\), is defined as

\[ \phi_i = \frac{\mathbb{E}_{X \sim i}(Var_{X_i}(f(x) | X_{\sim i}))} {Var (f(X ))} \]

Where \(\mathbb{E}_{X \sim i}(Var_{X_i}(f(x) | X_{\sim i}))\) is the expected variance that would be left if all variables but \(X_{\sim i}\) were to be fixed.

In order to generate stochasticity(\(X_i\)), a perturbation function is used and uses perturbation masks to modulate the generated perturbation. The perturbation functions available are inpainting that modulates pixel regions to a baseline state, amplitude and blurring.

The calculation of the indices also requires an estimator -- in practice this parameter does not change the results much -- JansenEstimator being recommended.

Finally the exploration of the manifold exploration is made using a sampling method, several samplers are proposed: Quasi-Monte Carlo (ScipySobolSequence, recommended) using Scipy's sobol sequence, Latin hypercubes -- LHSAmpler -- or Halton's sequences HaltonSequence.

Tip

For a quick a faithful explanations, we recommend to use grid_size in \([7, 12)\), nb_design in \(\{16, 32, 64\}\) (more is useless), and a QMC sampler.

Example

from xplique.attributions import SobolAttributionMethod
from xplique.attributions.global_sensitivity_analysis import (
    JansenEstimator, GlenEstimator,
    LHSampler, ScipySobolSequence,
    HaltonSequence)

# load images, labels and model
# ...

# default explainer (recommended)
explainer = SobolAttributionMethod(model, grid_size=8, nb_design=32)
explanations = method(images, labels) # one-hot encoded labels

If you want to change the estimator or the sampling:

from xplique.attributions import SobolAttributionMethod
from xplique.attributions.global_sensitivity_analysis import (
    JansenEstimator, GlenEstimator,
    LHSampler, ScipySobolSequence,
    HaltonSequence)

# load images, labels and model
# ...

explainer_lhs = SobolAttributionMethod(model, grid_size=8, nb_design=32, 
                                       sampler=LHSampler(), 
                                       estimator=GlenEstimator())
explanations_lhs = explainer_lhs(images, labels)

Notebooks

SobolAttributionMethod

Sobol' Attribution Method. Compute the total order Sobol' indices using a perturbation function on a grid and an adapted sampling as described in the original paper.

__init__(self,
         model,
         grid_size: int = 8,
         nb_design: int = 32,
         sampler: Optional[xplique.attributions.global_sensitivity_analysis.replicated_designs.ReplicatedSampler] = None,
         estimator: Optional[xplique.attributions.global_sensitivity_analysis.sobol_estimators.SobolEstimator] = None,
         perturbation_function: Union[Callable, str, None] = 'inpainting',
         batch_size=256,
         operator: Union[xplique.commons.operators.Tasks, str,
         Callable[[keras.src.engine.training.Model, tf.Tensor, tf.Tensor], float], None] = None)

Parameters

  • model : model

    • Model used for computing explanations.

  • grid_size : int = 8

    • Cut the image in a grid of (grid_size, grid_size) to estimate an indice per cell.

  • nb_design : int = 32

    • Must be a power of two. Number of design, the number of forward will be: nb_design * (grid_size**2 + 2). Generally not above 32.

  • sampler : Optional[xplique.attributions.global_sensitivity_analysis.replicated_designs.ReplicatedSampler] = None

    • Sampler used to generate the (quasi-)monte carlo samples, QMC (sobol sequence recommended). For more option, see the sampler module.

  • estimator : Optional[xplique.attributions.global_sensitivity_analysis.sobol_estimators.SobolEstimator] = None

    • Estimator used to compute the total order sobol' indices, Jansen recommended. For more option, see the estimator module.

  • perturbation_function : Union[Callable, str, None] = 'inpainting'

    • Function to call to apply the perturbation on the input. Can also be string in 'inpainting', 'blur'.

  • batch_size : batch_size=256

    • Batch size to use for the forwards.

  • operator : Union[xplique.commons.operators.Tasks, str, Callable[[keras.src.engine.training.Model, tf.Tensor, tf.Tensor], float], None] = None

    • Function g to explain, g take 3 parameters (f, x, y) and should return a scalar, with f the model, x the inputs and y the targets. If None, use the standard operator g(f, x, y) = f(x)[y].

explain(self,
        inputs: Union[tf.Dataset, tf.Tensor, numpy.ndarray],
        targets: Union[tf.Tensor, numpy.ndarray, None] = None) -> tf.Tensor

Compute the total Sobol' indices according to the explainer parameter (perturbation function, grid size...). Accept Tensor, numpy array or tf.data.Dataset (in that case targets is None).

Parameters

  • inputs : Union[tf.Dataset, tf.Tensor, numpy.ndarray]

    • Images to be explained, either tf.dataset, Tensor or numpy array.

      If Dataset, targets should not be provided (included in Dataset).

      Expected shape (N, W, H, C) or (N, W, H).

  • targets : Union[tf.Tensor, numpy.ndarray, None] = None

    • One-hot encoding for classification or direction {-1, +1} for regression.

      Tensor or numpy array.

      Expected shape (N, C) or (N).

Return

  • attributions_maps : tf.Tensor

    • GSA Attribution Method explanations, same shape as the inputs except for the channels.


  1. Look at the Variance! Efficient Black-box Explanations with Sobol-based Sensitivity Analysis (2021) ↩↩