Explainable Emotion Decoding for Human and Computer Vision

Modern Machine Learning (ML) has significantly advanced various research fields, but the opaque nature of ML models hinders their adoption in several domains. Explainable AI (XAI) addresses this challenge by providing additional information to help users understand the internal decision-making process of ML models. In the field of neuroscience, enriching a ML model for brain decoding with attribution-based XAI techniques means being able to highlight which brain areas correlate with the task at hand, thus offering valuable insights to domain experts. In this paper, we analyze human and Computer Vision (CV) systems in parallel, training and explaining two ML models based respectively on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and movie frames. We do so by leveraging the “StudyForrest” dataset, which includes functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans of subjects watching the “Forrest Gump” movie, emotion annotations, and eye-tracking data. For human vision the ML task is to link fMRI data with emotional annotations, and the explanations highlight the brain regions strongly correlated with the label. On the other hand, for computer vision, the input data is movie frames, and the explanations are pixel-level heatmaps. We cross-analyzed our results, linking human attention (obtained through eye-tracking) with XAI saliency on CV models and brain region activations. We show how a parallel analysis of human and computer vision can provide useful information for both the neuroscience community (allocation theory) and the ML community (biological plausibility of convolutional models)