Explainability Enhanced Object Detection Transformer With Feature Disentanglement

Explainability is a pivotal factor in determining whether a deep learning model can be authorized in critical applications. To enhance the explainability of models of end-to-end object DEtection with TRansformer (DETR), we introduce a disentanglement method that constrains the feature learning process, following a divide-and-conquer decoupling paradigm, similar to how people understand complex real-world problems. We first demonstrate the entangled property of the features between the extractor and detector and find that the regression function is a key factor contributing to the deterioration of disentangled feature activation. These highly entangled features always activate the local characteristics, making it difficult to cover the semantic information of an object, which also reduces the interpretability of single-backbone object detection models. Thus, an Explainability Enhanced object detection Transformer with feature Disentanglement (DETD) model is proposed, in which the Tensor Singular Value Decomposition (T-SVD) is used to produce feature bases and the Batch averaged Feature Spectral Penalization (BFSP) loss is introduced to constrain the disentanglement of the feature and balance the semantic activation. The proposed method is applied across three prominent backbones, two DETR variants, and a CNN based model. By combining two optimization techniques, extensive experiments on two datasets consistently demonstrate that the DETD model outperforms the counterpart in terms of object detection performance and feature disentanglement. The Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate the enhancement of feature learning explainability in the disentanglement view.