Face Aging by Explainable Conditional Adversarial Autoencoders

This paper deals with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) applied to face aging. An explainable face aging framework is proposed that builds on a well-known face aging approach, namely the Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder (CAAE). The proposed framework, namely, xAI-CAAE, couples CAAE with explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) methods, such as Saliency maps or Shapley additive explanations, to provide corrective feedback from the discriminator to the generator. xAI-guided training aims to supplement this feedback with explanations that provide a "reason" for the discriminator's decision. Moreover, Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) are leveraged to provide explanations for the face areas that most influence the decision of a pre-trained age classifier. To the best of our knowledge, xAI methods are utilized in the context of face aging for the first time. A thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates that the incorporation of the xAI systems contributed significantly to the generation of more realistic age-progressed and regressed images.