Portrait of Eleonora Mancini

Eleonora Mancini

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Supervisor
Cem Subakan
Co-supervisor
Mirco Ravanelli
Research Topics
Multimodal Learning
Natural Language Processing
Google Scholar
GitHub

Publications

Investigating the Effectiveness of Explainability Methods in Parkinson's Detection from Speech
Eleonora Mancini
Francesco Paissan
Paolo Torroni
Mirco Ravanelli
Cem Subakan
Speech impairments in Parkinson's disease (PD) provide significant early indicators for diagnosis. While models for speech-based PD detectio… (see more)n have shown strong performance, their interpretability remains underexplored. This study systematically evaluates several explainability methods to identify PD-specific speech features, aiming to support the development of accurate, interpretable models for clinical decision-making in PD diagnosis and monitoring. Our methodology involves (i) obtaining attributions and saliency maps using mainstream interpretability techniques, (ii) quantitatively evaluating the faithfulness of these maps and their combinations obtained via union and intersection through a range of established metrics, and (iii) assessing the information conveyed by the saliency maps for PD detection from an auxiliary classifier. Our results reveal that, while explanations are aligned with the classifier, they often fail to provide valuable information for domain experts.
2025-04-05
2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
LMAC-TD: Producing Time Domain Explanations for Audio Classifiers
Eleonora Mancini
Francesco Paissan
Mirco Ravanelli
Cem Subakan
Neural networks are typically black-boxes that remain opaque with regards to their decision mechanisms. Several works in the literature have… (see more) proposed post-hoc explanation methods to alleviate this issue. This paper proposes LMAC-TD, a post-hoc explanation method that trains a decoder to produce explanations directly in the time domain. This methodology builds upon the foundation of L-MAC, Listenable Maps for Audio Classifiers, a method that produces faithful and listenable explanations. We incorporate SepFormer, a popular transformer-based time-domain source separation architecture. We show through a user study that LMAC-TD significantly improves the audio quality of the produced explanations while not sacrificing from faithfulness.
2025-04-05
ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org