Explaining Human Comparisons using Alignment-Importance Heatmaps

We present a computational explainability approach for human comparison tasks, using Alignment Importance Score (AIS) heatmaps derived from deep-vision models. The AIS reflects a feature-map's unique contribution to the alignment between Deep Neural Network's (DNN) representational geometry and that of humans. We first validate the AIS by showing that prediction of out-of-sample human similarity judgments is improved when constructing representations using only higher-AIS feature maps identified from a training set. We then compute image-specific heatmaps that visually indicate the areas corresponding to feature-maps with higher AIS scores. These maps provide an intuitive explanation of which image areas are more important when it is compared to other images in a cohort. We observe a strong correspondence between these heatmaps and saliency maps produced by a gaze-prediction model. However, in some cases, meaningful differences emerge, as the dimensions relevant for comparison are not necessarily the most visually salient. In sum, Alignment Importance improves prediction of human similarity judgments from DNN embeddings, and provides interpretable insights into the relevant information in image space.