Spatial Attention Noise Masking for Causally Sufficient Interpretability

We present a novel causal approach to interpretability for computer vision models that dynamically masks the input image prior to classification. The interpretability of deep learning predictions is critical in high-stakes fields such as medical imaging, security, and autonomous driving. Most interpretability methods are applied passively to already trained models, which typically result in correlational rather than causal explanations. Existing causal interpretability methods are limited to post hoc analysis, weakening the causal claims. Additionally, existing active methods generally lack explanations that explicitly assign responsibility to input features. This work proposes a spatial attention noise masking framework that provides causal explanations about the features sufficient for the prediction. The proposed framework consists of: 1) a UNet-style mask generator, and 2) a Resnet18 encoder and linear classifier that classifies both masked and unmasked versions of an input image. The generated masks are regularized to be sparse and spatially smooth, while masked image embeddings are constrained to remain consistent with embeddings from the corresponding unmasked images. The resulting masks can be interpreted as feature attribution maps that are competitive with related interpretability methods while additionally providing strong causal explanations of model predictions. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate mask faithfulness, near-baseline classification performance across five classification tasks despite substantial masking of image information, and robustness to distribution shifts such as background swapping and natural adversarial examples. Qualitative comparisons further demonstrate mask behavior and competitive interpretability relative to state-of-the-art feature attribution methods.