Activation-Deactivation: A General Framework for Robust Post-hoc Explainable AI

Explainable AI (XAI) techniques are increasingly important for the validation and responsible use of modern deep learning models, but are difficult to evaluate due to the lack of good ground-truth to compare against. We propose a framework that serves as a quantifiable metric for the quality of XAI methods, based on continuous input perturbation. Our metric formally considers the sufficiency and necessity of the attributed information to the model's decision-making, and we illustrate a range of cases where it aligns better with human intuitions of explanation quality than do existing metrics. To exploit the properties of this metric, we also propose a novel XAI method, considering the case where we fine-tune a model using a differentiable approximation of the metric as a supervision signal. The result is an adapter module that can be trained on top of any black-box model to output causal explanations of the model's decision process, without degrading model performance. We show that the explanations generated by this method outperform those of competing XAI techniques according to a number of quantifiable metrics.

Concept-based explanations offer a promising approach for explaining the predictions of deep neural networks in terms of high-level, human-understandable concepts. However, existing methods either do not establish a causal connection between the concepts and model predictions or are limited in expressivity and only able to infer causal explanations involving single concepts. At the same time, the parallel line of work on formal abductive and contrastive explanations computes the minimal set of input features causally relevant for model outcomes but only considers low-level features such as pixels. Merging these two threads, in this work, we propose the notion of concept-based abductive and contrastive explanations that capture the minimal sets of high-level concepts causally relevant for model outcomes. We then present a family of algorithms that enumerate all minimal explanations while using concept erasure procedures to establish causal relationships. By appropriately aggregating such explanations, we are not only able to understand model predictions on individual images but also on collections of images where the model exhibits a user-specified, common behavior. We evaluate our approach on multiple models, datasets, and behaviors, and demonstrate its effectiveness in computing helpful, user-friendly explanations.

Class activation mapping (CAM) is one of the most widely used visual explanation families in explainable artificial intelligence. Its purpose is intuitive: it converts internal model evidence into a heatmap that highlights the image regions, convolutional channels, tokens, or patches that support a target class or concept. Since the first CAM formulation in 2016, the field has moved far beyond global-average-pooled CNN classifiers. CAM-style methods now include gradient-based post-hoc explanations, gradient-free score and ablation methods, high-resolution upscaling, weakly supervised localization and segmentation, transformer token attribution, causal and debiasing methods, and foundation-model-era approaches that use CLIP, DINO, SAM, or feature-distribution comparisons. This review synthesizes a strict corpus of 57 method-centered papers published from 2016 onward. The paper develops a taxonomy that separates methods by attribution mechanism, architectural dependence, and evaluation objective. It then reviews gradient-based CAMs, recent and hybrid CAM-style methods, and model-based or architecture-aware methods. Across the corpus, the main trend is clear: the field is shifting from explaining one class score in one low-resolution CNN layer toward comparative, multi-layer, probabilistic, token-aware, and foundation-model-aware explanations. At the same time, evaluation remains fragmented. Faithfulness, localization, robustness, computational cost, and human trust are often measured with different protocols. The review therefore emphasizes not only what each method contributes, but also which gap it leaves open and which later methods attempt to close that gap.