Revealing Model Biases: Assessing Deep Neural Networks via Recovered Sample Analysis

Abstract

This paper proposes a straightforward and cost-effective approach to assess whether a deep neural network (DNN) relies on the primary concepts of training samples or simply learns discriminative, yet simple and irrelevant features that can differentiate between classes. The paper highlights that DNNs, as discriminative classifiers, often find the simplest features to discriminate between classes, leading to a potential bias towards irrelevant features and sometimes missing generalization. While a generalization test is one way to evaluate a trained model's performance, it can be costly and may not cover all scenarios to ensure that the model has learned the primary concepts. Furthermore, even after conducting a generalization test, identifying bias in the model may not be possible. Here, the paper proposes a method that involves recovering samples from the parameters of the trained model and analyzing the reconstruction quality. We believe that if the model's weights are optimized to discriminate based on some features, these features will be reflected in the reconstructed samples. If the recovered samples contain the primary concepts of the training data, it can be concluded that the model has learned the essential and determining features. On the other hand, if the recovered samples contain irrelevant features, it can be concluded that the model is biased towards these features. The proposed method does not require any test or generalization samples, only the parameters of the trained model and the training data that lie on the margin. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can determine whether the model has learned the desired features of the training data. The paper highlights that our understanding of how these models work is limited, and the proposed approach addresses this issue.