  Recent advances in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model interpretability
have led to impressive progress in visualizing and understanding model
predictions. In particular, gradient-based visual attention methods have driven
much recent effort in using visual attention maps as a means for visual
explanations. A key problem, however, is these methods are designed for
classification and categorization tasks, and their extension to explaining
generative models, e.g. variational autoencoders (VAE) is not trivial. In this
work, we take a step towards bridging this crucial gap, proposing the first
technique to visually explain VAEs by means of gradient-based attention. We
present methods to generate visual attention from the learned latent space, and
also demonstrate such attention explanations serve more than just explaining
VAE predictions. We show how these attention maps can be used to localize
anomalies in images, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on the MVTec-AD
dataset. We also show how they can be infused into model training, helping
bootstrap the VAE into learning improved latent space disentanglement,
demonstrated on the Dsprites dataset.
