  Discovering and exploiting the causality in deep neural networks (DNNs) are
crucial challenges for understanding and reasoning causal effects (CE) on an
explainable visual model. "Intervention" has been widely used for recognizing a
causal relation ontologically. In this paper, we propose a causal inference
framework for visual reasoning via do-calculus. To study the intervention
effects on pixel-level features for causal reasoning, we introduce pixel-wise
masking and adversarial perturbation. In our framework, CE is calculated using
features in a latent space and perturbed prediction from a DNN-based model. We
further provide the first look into the characteristics of discovered CE of
adversarially perturbed images generated by gradient-based methods
\footnote{~~https://github.com/jjaacckkyy63/Causal-Intervention-AE-wAdvImg}.
Experimental results show that CE is a competitive and robust index for
understanding DNNs when compared with conventional methods such as
class-activation mappings (CAMs) on the Chest X-Ray-14 dataset for
human-interpretable feature(s) (e.g., symptom) reasoning. Moreover, CE holds
promises for detecting adversarial examples as it possesses distinct
characteristics in the presence of adversarial perturbations.
