Amar Kumar

DeCoDEx: Confounder Detector Guidance for Improved Diffusion-based Counterfactual Explanations

Nima Fathi

Amar Kumar

Brennan Nichyporuk

Mohammad Havaei

Deep learning classifiers are prone to latching onto dominant confounders present in a dataset rather than on the causal markers associated … (voir plus)with the target class, leading to poor generalization and biased predictions. Although explainability via counterfactual image generation has been successful at exposing the problem, bias mitigation strategies that permit accurate explainability in the presence of dominant and diverse artifacts remain unsolved. In this work, we propose the DeCoDEx framework and show how an external, pre-trained binary artifact detector can be leveraged during inference to guide a diffusion-based counterfactual image generator towards accurate explainability. Experiments on the CheXpert dataset, using both synthetic artifacts and real visual artifacts (support devices), show that the proposed method successfully synthesizes the counterfactual images that change the causal pathology markers associated with Pleural Effusion while preserving or ignoring the visual artifacts. Augmentation of ERM and Group-DRO classifiers with the DeCoDEx generated images substantially improves the results across underrepresented groups that are out of distribution for each class. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/NimaFathi/DeCoDEx.

2024-06-06

MIDL.io/2024/Conference (présentation orale)

doi.org

openreview.net

DeCoDEx: Confounder Detector Guidance for Improved Diffusion-based Counterfactual Explanations

Nima Fathi

Amar Kumar

Brennan Nichyporuk

Mohammad Havaei

Tal Arbel

Deep learning classifiers are prone to latching onto dominant confounders present in a dataset rather than on the causal markers associated … (voir plus)with the target class, leading to poor generalization and biased predictions. Although explainability via counterfactual image generation has been successful at exposing the problem, bias mitigation strategies that permit accurate explainability in the presence of dominant and diverse artifacts remain unsolved. In this work, we propose the DeCoDEx framework and show how an external, pre-trained binary artifact detector can be leveraged during inference to guide a diffusion-based counterfactual image generator towards accurate explainability. Experiments on the CheXpert dataset, using both synthetic artifacts and real visual artifacts (support devices), show that the proposed method successfully synthesizes the counterfactual images that change the causal pathology markers associated with Pleural Effusion while preserving or ignoring the visual artifacts. Augmentation of ERM and Group-DRO classifiers with the DeCoDEx generated images substantially improves the results across underrepresented groups that are out of distribution for each class. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/NimaFathi/DeCoDEx.

2024-02-13

MIDL.io/2024/Conference/Submission (inconnu)

openreview.net

Debiasing Counterfactuals in the Presence of Spurious Correlations

Amar Kumar

Nima Fathi

Raghav Mehta

Brennan Nichyporuk

Jean-Pierre R. Falet

Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Tal Arbel

Deep learning models can perform well in complex medical imaging classification tasks, even when basing their conclusions on spurious correl… (voir plus)ations (i.e. confounders), should they be prevalent in the training dataset, rather than on the causal image markers of interest. This would thereby limit their ability to generalize across the population. Explainability based on counterfactual image generation can be used to expose the confounders but does not provide a strategy to mitigate the bias. In this work, we introduce the first end-to-end training framework that integrates both (i) popular debiasing classifiers (e.g. distributionally robust optimization (DRO)) to avoid latching onto the spurious correlations and (ii) counterfactual image generation to unveil generalizable imaging markers of relevance to the task. Additionally, we propose a novel metric, Spurious Correlation Latching Score (SCLS), to quantify the extent of the classifier reliance on the spurious correlation as exposed by the counterfactual images. Through comprehensive experiments on two public datasets (with the simulated and real visual artifacts), we demonstrate that the debiasing method: (i) learns generalizable markers across the population, and (ii) successfully ignores spurious correlations and focuses on the underlying disease pathology.

2023-10-09

Clinical Image-Based Procedures, Fairness of AI in Medical Imaging, and Ethical and Philosophical Issues in Medical Imaging (publié)

doi.org

openreview.net

Counterfactual Image Synthesis for Discovery of Personalized Predictive Image Markers

Amar Kumar

Anjun Hu

Brennan Nichyporuk

Jean-Pierre R. Falet

Douglas Arnold

Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Tal Arbel