Understanding deep neural networks from the perspective of piecewise linear property

In recent years, deep learning models have been widely used and are behind major breakthroughs across many fields. Deep learning models are usually considered to be black boxes due to their large model structures and complicated hierarchical nonlinear transformations. As deep learning technology continues to develop, the understanding of deep learning models is raising concerns, such as the understanding of the training and prediction behaviors and the internal mechanism of models. In this thesis, we study the model understanding problem of deep neural networks from the perspective of piecewise linear property. First, we introduce the piecewise linear property. Next, we review the role and progress of deep learning understanding from the perspective of the piecewise linear property. The piecewise linear property reveals that deep neural networks with piecewise linear activation functions can generally divide the input space into a number of small disjointed regions that correspond to a local linear function within each region. Next, we investigate two typical understanding problems, namely model interpretation, and model complexity. In particular, we provide a series of derivations and analyses of the piecewise linear property of deep neural networks with piecewise linear activation functions. We propose an approach for interpreting the predictions given by such models based on the piecewise linear property. Next, we propose a method to provide local interpretation to a black box deep model by mimicking a piecewise linear approximation from the deep model. Then, we study deep neural networks with curve activation functions with the aim of providing piecewise linear approximations for these networks that would let them benefit from the piecewise linear property. After proposing a piecewise linear approximation framework, we investigate model complexity and model interpretation using the approximation. The thesis concludes by discussing future directions for understanding deep neural networks from the perspective of the piecewise linear property

Toward Interpretable Deep Reinforcement Learning with Linear Model U-Trees

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive success in many applications. A key component of many DRL models is a neural network representing a Q function, to estimate the expected cumulative reward following a state-action pair. The Q function neural network contains a lot of implicit knowledge about the RL problems, but often remains unexamined and uninterpreted. To our knowledge, this work develops the first mimic learning framework for Q functions in DRL. We introduce Linear Model U-trees (LMUTs) to approximate neural network predictions. An LMUT is learned using a novel on-line algorithm that is well-suited for an active play setting, where the mimic learner observes an ongoing interaction between the neural net and the environment. Empirical evaluation shows that an LMUT mimics a Q function substantially better than five baseline methods. The transparent tree structure of an LMUT facilitates understanding the network's learned knowledge by analyzing feature influence, extracting rules, and highlighting the super-pixels in image inputs.Comment: This paper is accepted by ECML-PKDD 201

Verifiable Reinforcement Learning via Policy Extraction

While deep reinforcement learning has successfully solved many challenging control tasks, its real-world applicability has been limited by the inability to ensure the safety of learned policies. We propose an approach to verifiable reinforcement learning by training decision tree policies, which can represent complex policies (since they are nonparametric), yet can be efficiently verified using existing techniques (since they are highly structured). The challenge is that decision tree policies are difficult to train. We propose VIPER, an algorithm that combines ideas from model compression and imitation learning to learn decision tree policies guided by a DNN policy (called the oracle) and its Q-function, and show that it substantially outperforms two baselines. We use VIPER to (i) learn a provably robust decision tree policy for a variant of Atari Pong with a symbolic state space, (ii) learn a decision tree policy for a toy game based on Pong that provably never loses, and (iii) learn a provably stable decision tree policy for cart-pole. In each case, the decision tree policy achieves performance equal to that of the original DNN policy

An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach to Understand Health Misinformation Transmission on YouTube

Health misinformation on social media devastates physical and mental health, invalidates health gains, and potentially costs lives. Deep learning methods have been deployed to predict the spread of misinformation, but they lack the interpretability due to their blackbox nature. To remedy this gap, this study proposes a novel interpretable deep learning, Generative Adversarial Network based Piecewise Wide and Attention Deep Learning (GAN-PiWAD), to predict health misinformation transmission in social media. GAN-PiWAD captures the interactions among multi-modal data, offers unbiased estimation of the total effect of each feature, and models the dynamic total effect of each feature. Interpretation of GAN-PiWAD indicates video description, negative video content, and channel credibility are key features that drive viral transmission of misinformation. This study contributes to IS with a novel interpretable deep learning that is generalizable to understand human decisions. We provide direct implications to design interventions to identify misinformation, control transmissions, and manage infodemics

BLADE: Filter Learning for General Purpose Computational Photography

The Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution (RAISR) method of Romano, Isidoro, and Milanfar is a computationally efficient image upscaling method using a trained set of filters. We describe a generalization of RAISR, which we name Best Linear Adaptive Enhancement (BLADE). This approach is a trainable edge-adaptive filtering framework that is general, simple, computationally efficient, and useful for a wide range of problems in computational photography. We show applications to operations which may appear in a camera pipeline including denoising, demosaicing, and stylization