Holistic-CAM: Ultra-lucid and Sanity Preserving Visual Interpretation in Holistic Stage of CNNs

As the visual interpretations for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), backpropagation attribution methods have been garnering growing attention. Nevertheless, majority of these methods merely concentrate on the ultimate convolutional layer, leading to tiny and concentrated interpretations that fail to adequately clarify the model-central attention. Therefore, we propose a precise attribution method (i.e., Holistic-CAM) for high-definition visual interpretation in the holistic stage of CNNs. Specifically, we first present weighted positive gradients to guarantee the sanity of interpretations in shallow layers and leverage multi-scale fusion to improve the resolution across the holistic stage. Then, we further propose a denoising strategy based on the fundamental scale component to eliminate the faithless attribution derived from fusing larger-scale features. The proposed method is capable of simultaneously rendering fine-grained and faithful interpretations for CNNs from shallow to deep layers. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Holistic-CAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on common-used benchmarks, including deletion and insertion, energy-based point game as well as Remove and Debias on ImageNet-1k, it also passes the sanity check easily.