  Information fusion is an essential part of numerous engineering systems and
biological functions, e.g., human cognition. Fusion occurs at many levels,
ranging from the low-level combination of signals to the high-level aggregation
of heterogeneous decision-making processes. While the last decade has witnessed
an explosion of research in deep learning, fusion in neural networks has not
observed the same revolution. Specifically, most neural fusion approaches are
ad hoc, are not understood, are distributed versus localized, and/or
explainability is low (if present at all). Herein, we prove that the fuzzy
Choquet integral (ChI), a powerful nonlinear aggregation function, can be
represented as a multi-layer network, referred to hereafter as ChIMP. We also
put forth an improved ChIMP (iChIMP) that leads to a stochastic gradient
descent-based optimization in light of the exponential number of ChI inequality
constraints. An additional benefit of ChIMP/iChIMP is that it enables
eXplainable AI (XAI). Synthetic validation experiments are provided and iChIMP
is applied to the fusion of a set of heterogeneous architecture deep models in
remote sensing. We show an improvement in model accuracy and our previously
established XAI indices shed light on the quality of our data, model, and its
decisions.
