No retraction, correction or concern found when last checked on Oct 18, 2026.
Unmasking Clever Hans predictors and assessing what machines really learn
Sebastian Lapuschkin, Stephan Wäldchen, Alexander Binder and 3 more
Nature Communications · 2019 · CC BY
doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08987-4
Abstract
Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems, reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly intelligent behavior. Here we apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.
Full text
Its licence does not allow us to show the full text. Read it at PubMed Central:
Read at PubMed CentralReferences 53
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Haufe S, et al. On the interpretation of weight vectors of linear models in multivariate neuroimaging. Neuroimage. 2014;87:96-110.
Not in our library10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.10.067
- 5.
Mnih V, et al. Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning. Nature. 2015;518:529-533.
Not in our library10.1038/nature14236
- 6.
Mnih, V. et al. Playing Atari with deep reinforcement learning. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602 (2013).
Not in our library
- 7.
Silver D, et al. Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search. Nature. 2016;529:484-489.
Not in our library10.1038/nature16961
- 8.
Silver D, et al. Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge. Nature. 2017;550:354-359.
Not in our library10.1038/nature24270
- 9.
Silver D, et al. A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and go through self-play. Science. 2018;362:1140-1144.
Not in our library10.1126/science.aar6404
- 10.
Moravčk M, et al. DeepStack: expert-level artificial intelligence in heads-up no-limit poker. Science. 2017;356:508-513.
Not in our library10.1126/science.aam6960
- 11.
Pfungst O. Clever Hans (the Horse of Mr. Von Osten): contribution to experimental animal and human psychology. J. Philos. Psychol. Sci. Method. 1911;8:663-666.
Not in our library
- 12.
Guyon I, Elisseeff A. An introduction to variable and feature selection. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2003;3:1157-1182.
Not in our library
- 13.
Simonyan, K., Vedaldi, A. & Zisserman, A. Deep inside convolutional networks: Visualising image classification models and saliency maps. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6034 (2013).
Not in our library
- 14.
Yosinski, J., Clune, J., Nguyen, A., Fuchs, T. & Lipson, H. Understanding neural networks through deep visualization. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06579 (2015).
Not in our library
- 15.
Nguyen, A., Yosinski, J. & Clune, J. Multifaceted feature visualization: Uncovering the different types of features learned by each neuron in deep neural networks. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03616 (2016).
Not in our library
- 16.
Nguyen, A., Dosovitskiy, A., Yosinski, J., Brox, T. & Clune, J. Synthesizing the preferred inputs for neurons in neural networks via deep generator networks. (D. D. Lee, M. Sugiyama, U. von Luxburg, I. Guyon, R. Garnett eds.) In Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 3387–3395 (Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY) (2016).
Not in our library
- 17.
Zeiler, M. D. & Fergus, R. Visualizing and understanding convolutional networks. (D. Fleet, T. Pajdla, B. Schiele, T. Tuytelaars eds.) In Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision, 818–833 (Springer, Cham) (2014).
Not in our library
- 18.
- 19.
Baehrens D, et al. How to explain individual classification decisions. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2010;11:1803-1831.
Not in our library
- 20.
Ribeiro, M. T., Singh, S. & Guestrin, C. “Why should I trust you?”: explaining the predictions of any classifier. (B. Krishnapuram, M. Shah, A. J. Smola, C. C. Aggarwal, D. Shen, R. Rastogi eds.) In Proc. ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 1135–1144 (ACM, New York, NY) (2016).
Not in our library
- 21.
Zhou, B., Khosla, A., Lapedriza, À., Oliva, A. & Torralba, A. Learning deep features for discriminative localization. (T. Tuytelaars, F.-F. Li, R. Bajcsy eds.) In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2921–2929 (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ) (2016).
Not in our library
- 22.
Montavon G, Lapuschkin S, Binder A, Samek W, Müller K. Explaining nonlinear classification decisions with deep Taylor decomposition. Pattern Recognit. 2017;65:211-222.
Not in our library10.1016/j.patcog.2016.11.008
- 23.
Sturm I, Lapuschkin S, Samek W, Müller KR. Interpretable deep neural networks for single-trial EEG classification. J. Neurosci. Methods. 2016;274:141-145.
Not in our library10.1016/j.jneumeth.2016.10.008
- 24.
Greydanus, S., Koul, A., Dodge, J. & Fern, A. Visualizing and understanding Atari agents. (J. Dy, A. Krause eds.) In Proc. International Conference on Machine Learning, 1787–1796 (JMLR.org, Brookline, MA) (2018).
Not in our library
- 25.
Zahavy, T., Ben-Zrihem, N. & Mannor, S. Graying the black box: Understanding DQNs. (M.-F. Balcan, K. Q. Weinberger eds.) In Proc. International Conference on Machine Learning, 1899–1908 (JMLR.org, Brookline, MA) (2016).
Not in our library
- 26.
- 27.
Turing AM. Mind. Mind. 1950;59:433-460.
Not in our library10.1093/mind/lix.236.433
- 28.
Turing, A. M. Computing machinery and intelligence. (R. Epstein, G. Roberts, G. Beber eds.) In Parsing the Turing Test, 23–65 (Springer, 2009).
Not in our library
- 29.
Legg S, Hutter M. Universal intelligence: a definition of machine intelligence. Mind Mach. 2007;17:391-444.
Not in our library10.1007/s11023-007-9079-x
- 30.
Hernández-Orallo J. Evaluation in artificial intelligence: From task-oriented to ability-oriented measurement. Artif. Intell. Rev. 2017;48:397-447.
Not in our library10.1007/s10462-016-9505-7
- 31.
Perronnin, F., Sánchez, J. & Mensink, T. Improving the Fisher kernel for large-scale image classification. (K. Daniilidis, P. Maragos, N. Paragios eds.) In Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision, 143–156 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg) (2010).
Not in our library
- 32.
Sánchez J, Perronnin F, Mensink T, Verbeek JJ. Image classification with the Fisher vector: theory and practice. Int. J. Comput. Vision. 2013;105:222-245.
Not in our library10.1007/s11263-013-0636-x
- 33.
Everingham M, Van Gool L, Williams CK, Winn J, Zisserman A. The Pascal visual object classes (VOC) challenge. Int. J. Comput. Vision. 2010;88:303-338.
Not in our library10.1007/s11263-009-0275-4
- 34.
Lapuschkin, S., Binder, A., Montavon, G., Müller, K.-R. & Samek, W. Analyzing classifiers: Fisher vectors and deep neural networks. (T. Tuytelaars, F.-F. Li, R. Bajcsy eds.) In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2912–2920 (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ) (2016).
Not in our library
- 35.
Chen, Y. F., Everett, M., Liu, M. & How, J. P. Socially aware motion planning with deep reinforcement learning. (H. Zhang, R. Vaughan eds.) In Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 1343–1350 (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ) (2017).
Not in our library
- 36.
Rajalingham R, et al. Large-scale, high-resolution comparison of the core visual object recognition behavior of humans, monkeys, and state-of-the-art deep artificial neural networks. J. Neurosci. 2018;38:7255-7269.
Not in our library10.1523/jneurosci.0388-18.2018
- 37.
Lake BM, Ullman TD, Tenenbaum JB, Gershman SJ. Building machines that learn and think like people. Behav. Brain Sci. 2017;40:e253.
Not in our library10.1017/s0140525x16001837
- 38.
Tsividis, P. A., Pouncy, T., Xu, J. L., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Gershman, S. J. Human learning in Atari. (G. Sukthankar, C. Geib eds.) In Proc. AAAI Spring Symposium Series, 643–646 (AAAI Press, Palo Alto, CA) (2017).
Not in our library
- 39.
Winston PH, Horn B. The Psychology of Computer Vision. 1975.
Not in our library
- 40.
Smith LB, Jones SS, Landau B, Gershkoff-Stowe L, Samuelson L. Object name learning provides on-the-job training for attention. Psychol. Sci. 2002;13:13-19.
Not in our library10.1111/1467-9280.00403
Cited by papers we hold 6
- Joint EANM/SNMMI guideline on radiomics in nuclear medicine · 2022No notice
- Deep learning in drug discovery: an integrative review and future challenges · 2022No notice
- Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive virtual reality experience · 2021Not checked
- SpookyNet: Learning force fields with electronic degrees of freedom and nonlocal effects · 2021No notice
- Explainability for artificial intelligence in healthcare: a multidisciplinary perspective · 2020No notice
- Unifying machine learning and quantum chemistry with a deep neural network for molecular wavefunctions · 2019No notice
Reads
Read by people on this page
None yet.
Checked or read by AI through naulon
None yet.
A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.
Are you an author?
Is this your paper?
Claim it to add your note and be paid when agents cite it. Free.