Diverse by Design: Architectural Constraints for Prototype-Based Interpretability

📅 2026-09-22
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
针对原型神经网络的局限性,提出多样性感知原型学习(DAPL),通过架构约束强制原型多样性,并引入前景感知训练和定量评估指标。
📝 Abstract
Prototype-based neural networks provide inherent interpretability through case-based reasoning, yet suffer from critical limitations: prototypes converge to redundant features, fail to capture diverse semantic parts, and lack quantitative interpretability assessment. We propose Diversity-Aware Prototype Learning (DAPL), which enforces prototype diversity through architectural constraints rather than explicit regularization. Our approach leverages multi-head self-attention with strict one-to-one attention-to-prototype mapping, ensuring each prototype specializes in distinct visual features. We further introduce foreground-aware training to focus prototypes on semantically meaningful regions and develop comprehensive evaluation metrics (Coverage and Diversity) for quantitative interpretability assessment. Experiments on CUB-200-2011 demonstrate substantial improvements: DAPL with foreground-aware training achieves 81.69\% accuracy with 0.596 Coverage and 0.427 Diversity, providing the best overall balance across all evaluated prototype-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xinmiaolin/DAPL.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

prototype-based neural networks
redundant features
diverse semantic parts
quantitative interpretability assessment
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Diversity-Aware Prototype Learning
architectural constraints
multi-head self-attention
foreground-aware training
Coverage and Diversity
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Xinmiao Lin
Rochester Institute of Technology
M
Matthew Wright
Rochester Institute of Technology