Making deep neural networks right for the right scientific reasons by interacting with their explanations

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performances in many real-world applications. Unfortunately, they may show Clever Hans-like behaviour (making use of confounding factors within datasets) to achieve high performance. In this work we introduce the novel learning setting of explanatory interactive learning and illustrate its benefits on a plant phenotyping research task. Explanatory interactive learning adds the scientist into the training loop, who interactively revises the original model by providing feedback on its explanations. Our experimental results demonstrate that explanatory interactive learning can help to avoid Clever Hans moments in machine learning and encourages (or discourages, if appropriate) trust in the underlying model.