Explainable AI

Current research on explainability and interpretability of machine learning algorithms

This site is a community effort by the Explainable AI members. Please join the group and reach out to the administrators if you have any questions.

Made with Jekyll and Hyde. Idea and base code for the website adapted from ml4code.

Visualizing and Understanding Recurrent Networks

Andrej Karpathy, Justin Johnson, Li Fei-Fei. 2015

[ArXiv]    

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and specifically a variant with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), are enjoying renewed interest as a result of successful applications in a wide range of machine learning problems that involve sequential data. However, while LSTMs provide exceptional results in practice, the source of their performance and their limitations remain rather poorly understood. Using character-level language models as an interpretable testbed, we aim to bridge this gap by providing an analysis of their representations, predictions and error types. In particular, our experiments reveal the existence of interpretable cells that keep track of long-range dependencies such as line lengths, quotes and brackets. Moreover, our comparative analysis with finite horizon n-gram models traces the source of the LSTM improvements to long-range structural dependencies. Finally, we provide analysis of the remaining errors and suggests areas for further study.