CoSy: Evaluating Textual Explanations of Neurons

A crucial aspect of understanding the complex nature of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is the ability to explain learned concepts within their latent representations. While various methods exist to connect neurons to textual descriptions of human-understandable concepts, evaluating the quality of these explanation methods presents a major challenge in the field due to a lack of unified, general-purpose quantitative evaluation. In this work, we introduce CoSy (Concept Synthesis) -- a novel, architecture-agnostic framework to evaluate the quality of textual explanations for latent neurons. Given textual explanations, our proposed framework leverages a generative model conditioned on textual input to create data points representing the textual explanation. Then, the neuron's response to these explanation data points is compared with the response to control data points, providing a quality estimate of the given explanation. We ensure the reliability of our proposed framework in a series of meta-evaluation experiments and demonstrate practical value through insights from benchmarking various concept-based textual explanation methods for Computer Vision tasks, showing that tested explanation methods significantly differ in quality.