Evaluation of FEM and MLFEM AI-explainers in Image Classification tasks with reference-based and no-reference metrics

The most popular methods and algorithms for AI are, for the vast majority, black boxes. Black boxes can be an acceptable solution to unimportant problems (in the sense of the degree of impact) but have a fatal flaw for the rest. Therefore the explanation tools for them have been quickly developed. The evaluation of their quality remains an open research question. In this technical report, we remind recently proposed post-hoc explainers FEM and MLFEM which have been designed for explanations of CNNs in image and video classification tasks. We also propose their evaluation with reference-based and no-reference metrics. The reference-based metrics are Pearson Correlation coefficient and Similarity computed between the explanation maps and the ground truth, which is represented by Gaze Fixation Density Maps obtained due to a psycho-visual experiment. As a no-reference metric we use "stability" metric, proposed by Alvarez-Melis and Jaakkola. We study its behaviour, consensus with reference-based metrics and show that in case of several kind of degradations on input images, this metric is in agreement with reference-based ones. Therefore it can be used for evaluation of the quality of explainers when the ground truth is not available.