Structured Gradient-based Interpretations via Norm-Regularized
  Adversarial Training
Shizhan Gong Qi Dou Farzan Farnia
Gradient-based saliency maps have been widely used to explain the decisions
of deep neural network classifiers. However, standard gradient-based
interpretation maps, including the simple gradient and integrated gradient
algorithms, often lack desired structures such as sparsity and connectedness in
their application to real-world computer vision models. A frequently used
approach to inducing sparsity structures into gradient-based saliency maps is
to alter the simple gradient scheme using sparsification or norm-based
regularization. A drawback with such post-processing methods is their
frequently-observed significant loss in fidelity to the original simple
gradient map. In this work, we propose to apply adversarial training as an
in-processing scheme to train neural networks with structured simple gradient
maps. We show a duality relation between the regularized norms of the
adversarial perturbations and gradient-based maps, based on which we design
adversarial training loss functions promoting sparsity and group-sparsity
properties in simple gradient maps. We present several numerical results to
show the influence of our proposed norm-based adversarial training methods on
the standard gradient-based maps of standard neural network architectures on
benchmark image datasets.