Review for NeurIPS paper: How Can I Explain This to You? An Empirical Study of Deep Neural Network Explanation Methods

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Weaknesses: The term'unified' should be revised as the paper addresses a partial unification. For instance, the unified framework does not take into account a closed loop between the DNN and the explanation method (the explanation method can be itself another DNN interacting in a double sense with the prediction DNN) or other two-stage adaptive networks [1], [2]. In addition, an alternative to example based explanation is'opening the black box' in terms of intra-layer and inter-layer statistical properties of a DNN [3]: these may be enough to explain lack of generality (and thus absence of recommendation) of a given network depending on the input available data and the classification paradigm considered. Thus, a positioning must be provided with respect to the above issues in order to make the paper more informative with respect to the literature. The weak spots of the analysis are twofold.