Towards Self-Explainability of Deep Neural Networks with Heatmap Captioning and Large-Language Models

Abstract: Heatmaps are widely used to interpret deep neural networks, particularly for computer vision tasks, and the heatmap-based explainable AI (XAI) techniques are a well-researched topic. However, most studies concentrate on enhancing the quality of the generated heatmap or discovering alternate heatmap generation techniques, and little effort has been devoted to making heatmap-based XAI automatic, interactive, scalable, and accessible. To address this gap, we propose a framework that includes two modules: (1) context modelling and (2) reasoning. We proposed a template-based image captioning approach for context modelling to create text-based contextual information from the heatmap and input data. The reasoning module leverages a LLM to provide explanations in combination with specialised knowledge. Our qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and heatmap captioning approach. The code for the proposed template-based heatmap captioning approach will be publicly available.