Abstract: Explainability methods have been widely used to provide insight into the decisions made by statistical models, thus facilitating their adoption in various domains within the industry. Counterfactual explanation methods aim to improve our understanding of a model by perturbing samples in a way that would alter its response in an unexpected manner. This information is helpful for users and for machine learning practitioners to understand and improve their models. Given the value provided by counterfactual explanations, there is a growing interest in the research community to investigate and propose new methods. However, we identify two issues that could hinder the progress in this field. (1) Existing metrics do not accurately reflect the value of an explainability method for the users. (2) Comparisons between methods are usually performed with datasets like CelebA, where images are annotated with attributes that do not fully describe them and with subjective attributes such as ``Attractive''. In this work, we address these problems by proposing an evaluation method with a principled metric to evaluate and compare different counterfactual explanation methods. The evaluation method is based on a synthetic dataset where images are fully described by their annotated attributes. As a result, we are able to perform a fair comparison of multiple explainability methods in the recent literature, obtaining insights about their performance. We make the code public for the benefit of the research community.

Abstract: Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) explore the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to achieve better performance. However, most of the progress has been made by scaling CNN architectures, which usually raise computational demands and memory consumption. This makes modern architectures less applicable in practice. In addition, most CNN-based SR methods do not fully utilize the informative hierarchical features that are helpful for final image recovery. In order to address these issues, we propose a directional variance attention network (DiVANet), a computationally efficient yet accurate network for SISR. Specifically, we introduce a novel directional variance attention (DiVA) mechanism to capture long-range spatial dependencies and exploit inter-channel dependencies simultaneously for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, we propose a residual attention feature group (RAFG) for parallelizing attention and residual block computation. The output of each residual block is linearly fused at the RAFG output to provide access to the whole feature hierarchy. In parallel, DiVA extracts most relevant features from the network for improving the final output and preventing information loss along the successive operations inside the network. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DiVANet over the state of the art in several datasets, while maintaining relatively low computation and memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/DiVANet.

Abstract: Micro-expressions reveal underlying emotions and are widely applied in political psychology, lie detection, law enforcement and medical care. Micro-expression spotting aims to detect the temporal locations of facial expressions from video sequences and is a crucial task in micro-expression recognition. In this study, the problem of micro-expression spotting is formulated as micro-expression classification per frame. We propose an effective spotting model with sliding windows called the spatio-temporal spotting network. The method involves a sliding window detection mechanism, combines the spatial features from the local key frames and the global temporal features and performs micro-expression spotting. The experiments are conducted on the CAS(ME)2 database and the SAMM Long Videos database, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 30.58% for the CAS(ME)2 and 23.98% for the SAMM Long Videos according to overall F-scores.