Listen to Interpret: Post-hoc Interpretability for Audio Networks with NMF

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Jayneel Parekh, Sanjeel Parekh, Pavlo Mozharovskyi, Florence d'Alché-Buc, Gaël Richard

Abstract

This paper tackles post-hoc interpretability for audio processing networks. Our goal is to interpret decisions of a trained network in terms of high-level audio objects that are also listenable for the end-user. To this end, we propose a novel interpreter design that incorporates non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). In particular, a regularized interpreter module is trained to take hidden layer representations of the targeted network as input and produce time activations of pre-learnt NMF components as intermediate outputs. Our methodology allows us to generate intuitive audio-based interpretations that explicitly enhance parts of the input signal most relevant for a network's decision. We demonstrate our method's applicability on popular benchmarks, including a real-world multi-label classification task.