Understanding the decision process of neural networks is hard. One vital
method for explanation is to attribute its decision to pivotal features.
Although many algorithms are proposed, most of them solely improve the
faithfulness to the model. However, the real environment contains many random
noises, which may leads to great fluctuations in the explanations. More
seriously, recent works show that explanation algorithms are vulnerable to
adversarial attacks. All of these make the explanation hard to trust in real
scenarios.
To bridge this gap, we propose a model-agnostic method \emph{Median Test for
Feature Attribution} (MeTFA) to quantify the uncertainty and increase the
stability of explanation algorithms with theoretical guarantees. MeTFA has the
following two functions: (1) examine whether one feature is significantly
important or unimportant and generate a MeTFA-significant map to visualize the
results; (2) compute the confidence interval of a feature attribution score and
generate a MeTFA-smoothed map to increase the stability of the explanation.
Experiments show that MeTFA improves the visual quality of explanations and
significantly reduces the instability while maintaining the faithfulness. To
quantitatively evaluate the faithfulness of an explanation under different
noise settings, we further propose several robust faithfulness metrics.
Experiment results show that the MeTFA-smoothed explanation can significantly
increase the robust faithfulness. In addition, we use two scenarios to show
MeTFA's potential in the applications. First, when applied to the SOTA
explanation method to locate context bias for semantic segmentation models,
MeTFA-significant explanations use far smaller regions to maintain 99\%+
faithfulness. Second, when tested with different explanation-oriented attacks,
MeTFA can help defend vanilla, as well as adaptive, adversarial attacks against
explanations.