Towards Human-Understandable Visual Explanations: Human Imperceptible Cues Can Better Be Removed

Explainable AI (XAI) methods focus on explaining what a neural network has learned - in other words, identifying the features that are the most influential to the prediction. In this paper, we call them "distinguishing features". However, whether a human can make sense of the generated explanation also depends on the perceptibility of these features to humans. To make sure an explanation is human-understandable, we argue that the capabilities of humans, constrained by the Human Visual System (HVS) and psychophysics, need to be taken into account. We propose the human perceptibility principle for XAI, stating that, to generate human-understandable explanations, neural networks should be steered towards focusing on human-understandable cues during training. We conduct a case study regarding the classification of real vs. fake face images, where many of the distinguishing features picked up by standard neural networks turn out not to be perceptible to humans. By applying the proposed principle, a neural network with human-understandable explanations is trained which, in a survey, is shown to better align with human intuition. This is likely to make the AI more trustworthy and open the door to humans learning from machines. In the case study, we specifically investigate and analyze the behaviour of the human-imperceptible high spatial frequency features in neural networks and XAI methods.