The field explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has brought about an arsenal of methods to render Machine Learning (ML) predictions more interpretable. But how useful explanations provided by transparent ML methods are for humans remains difficult to assess. Here we investigate the quality of interpretable computer vision algorithms using techniques from psychophysics. In crowdsourced annotation tasks we study the impact of different interpretability approaches on annotation accuracy and task time. We compare these quality metrics with classical XAI, automated quality metrics. Our results demonstrate that psychophysical experiments allow for robust quality assessment of transparency in machine learning. Interestingly the quality metrics computed without humans in the loop did not provide a consistent ranking of interpretability methods nor were they representative for how useful an explanation was for humans. These findings highlight the potential of methods from classical psychophysics for modern machine learning applications. We hope that our results provide convincing arguments for evaluating interpretability in its natural habitat, human-ML interaction, if the goal is to obtain an authentic assessment of interpretability.

使用心理物理学技术研究了可解释计算机视觉算法的质量，发现经典的心理物理学方法可以用于机器学习应用程序中，而无需人为干预，使用传统的自动化质量指标计算出的质量指标不能提供一致的解释方法排名，这些发现强调了只有在人机交互的自然环境中评估解释能力才能获得真实的解释能力评估。

透明机器学习的质量指标与是否有人参与无关