ViTree: Single-path Neural Tree for Step-wise Interpretable Fine-grained
  Visual Categorization
Danning Lao Qi Liu Jiazi Bu Junchi Yan Wei Shen
As computer vision continues to advance and finds widespread applications
across various domains, the need for interpretability in deep learning models
becomes paramount. Existing methods often resort to post-hoc techniques or
prototypes to explain the decision-making process, which can be indirect and
lack intrinsic illustration. In this research, we introduce ViTree, a novel
approach for fine-grained visual categorization that combines the popular
vision transformer as a feature extraction backbone with neural decision trees.
By traversing the tree paths, ViTree effectively selects patches from
transformer-processed features to highlight informative local regions, thereby
refining representations in a step-wise manner. Unlike previous tree-based
models that rely on soft distributions or ensembles of paths, ViTree selects a
single tree path, offering a clearer and simpler decision-making process. This
patch and path selectivity enhances model interpretability of ViTree, enabling
better insights into the model's inner workings. Remarkably, extensive
experimentation validates that this streamlined approach surpasses various
strong competitors and achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining
exceptional interpretability which is proved by multi-perspective methods. Code
can be found at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepVisionLab/ViTree.