Perturbation-Based Feature Attribution

Latest papers 17

Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Towards Explainable Benchmarking for Data-driven Post-Wildfire Debris Flow Prediction

Post-wildfire debris flows (PFDFs) are destructive sediment-laden hazards triggered when intense rainfall strikes recently burned terrain, destabilizing hillslopes and threatening infrastructure, local economies, and community safety. Data-driven methods have been proposed to learn predictive patterns directly from historical PFDF observations. However, the current research landscape of data-driven PFDF prediction remains highly fragmented across feature spaces, model architectures, and evaluation protocols, making rigorous comparison and the derivation of scientific insights difficult. Moreover, existing studies lack a systematic investigation into the relative importance of heterogeneous factors (e.g., meteorological conditions, terrain characteristics, soil properties, and burn severity) in triggering PFDF. To address these limitations, we present a unified benchmark for data-driven PFDF prediction, enabling fair and comprehensive evaluation across diverse models and feature configurations. Furthermore, to better understand the underlying drivers of PFDF formation, we propose a reinforcement learning-based feature selection framework that identifies factors whose perturbations render positive and negative events indistinguishable, thereby discovering the regional underlying mechanisms of PFDF occurrence across regions. Our code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/KINDLab-Fly/PFDF-Benchmark.
Oct 1, 2026cs.AI

A Comparative Explainability Framework for DeBERTa-v3 in Zero-Shot Medical Abstract Classification

A comparative explainability framework is presented to audit DeBERTa-v3 under zero-shot classification of medical abstracts. The work addresses the disagreement problem in Explainable Artificial Intelligence, where different attribution methods produce divergent explanations for the same input and prediction. A natural language inference engine is implemented over the Medical Abstracts corpus with five enriched hypotheses per diagnostic category and a balanced sample of one thousand texts per class. Five explanation methods are compared: SHAP and LIME as model-agnostic approaches, occlusion and Input x Gradient as deep-learning-specific approaches, and Attention x Gradient as a transformer-specific approach. Explanations are standardized through top-token attribution, and pairwise agreement is quantified using the Jaccard index. High predictive accuracy is achieved across well-defined clinical domains, whereas performance degrades under high semantic ambiguity. Explanatory stability directly mirrors predictive certainty, exhibiting strong convergence in univalent categories and a marked drop under diagnostic uncertainty. Furthermore, qualitative error auditing uncovers three systemic failure mechanisms: lexical hypersensitivity, semantic overlap, and loss of attribution coherence. The results support the combined use of several explanation methods and quantitative agreement metrics when auditing transformer-based models in medical text classification, and suggest prioritizing specific clinical ontologies over broad diagnostic labels.
Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

When Is an SAE Feature Interpretable? A Validation Ladder for EEG Foundation Models

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose dense model activations into discrete latents, making individual features easy to interpret--and easy to misinterpret. In EEG foundation models, this creates a tempting inference: if removing alpha-band activity strongly changes a latent's activation, one might conclude that the latent represents alpha activity. Across 27 settings spanning three backbones, three EEG datasets, and three network depths, this interpretation initially appears compelling: alpha removal changes latent firing 7.3 times more than an equal-width sham notch (95% CI [6.2, 8.7], bootstrapped over settings). However, the alpha filter also deletes far more signal than the sham. After normalizing by removed spectral energy, the ratio falls to 0.28 (95% CI [0.22, 0.36]) and exceeds one in none of the 27 settings. Latents selected for their response to alpha removal are, on clean EEG, slightly anti-correlated with relative alpha power (mean r = -0.073), giving no support for a simple alpha-detector reading. Motivated by this failure case, we propose a validation ladder for semantic interpretations of SAE latents: it asks in turn whether a latent responds, whether that response survives controlling for how much signal the intervention removes, whether it is specific rather than broadly fragile, and whether the proposed property is visible on unperturbed data--while separately testing the stronger claim that the latent matters to a task classifier. Perturbation sensitivity alone does not establish what an SAE latent represents.
Sep 27, 2026cs.SD

Mask-Induced Displacement in Audio XAI via Logit Trajectory Decomposition

Perturbation-based XAI methods for audio classifiers often estimate feature importance by masking spectrogram regions and crediting output changes to the retained signal. Yet they typically assume the fill (the mask replacement) is negligible. We propose logit-space trajectory decomposition to examine this assumption. An on-axis component captures output along a line connecting the fully filled (occluded) spectrogram to the fully retained original; an off-axis component captures perpendicular displacement. We evaluate across three fills, three audio classifiers, and 1,100 AudioSet clips. We demonstrate that no fill is acoustically neutral under full occlusion: Zero fill activates silence and Gaussian Noise fill activates broadband noise. Under partial masking, 41-77% of output displacement is off-axis, with the direction of the residual stable across mask retention fraction and specific to each model-fill combination. Attribution methods are unevenly exposed to off-axis displacement through their sampling and weighting strategies, revealing apparatus-dependence. Where the off-axis residual is stable and low-dimensional, its structure affords mitigation.
Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

Faithful Faithfulness Evaluations: Challenges & Pitfalls Learned from a Breast MRI Case Study

Saliency maps are widely used to explain deep learning predictions in medical imaging, yet visually plausible explanations do not necessarily reflect a model's true decision process and may therefore mislead clinicians. We investigate this problem using a Vision Transformer-based breast MRI classifier trained on the ODELIA Breast MRI Challenge dataset and evaluate multiple saliency methods, including Last-layer Attention, Attention Rollout, Grad-SAM, Gradient Attention Rollout, GMAR, Grad-CAM, and HiResCAM. Our study highlights two often-overlooked challenges in perturbation-based faithfulness evaluation. First, method rankings depend strongly on the perturbation strategy, varying across intensity-based perturbations and transformer-based attention masking. Second, benchmarking saliency methods requires distinguishing between class-specific and class-agnostic explanations. To enable fair comparisons, we introduce non-class-specific variants of gradient-based methods and evaluate both settings separately. Across protocols, Grad-CAM and Gradient Attention Rollout consistently emerged as the strongest class-specific methods, although their relative ranking depended on the evaluation design. These findings expose important limitations of current saliency-based explainability approaches and highlight the need for more robust and standardized evaluation frameworks for trustworthy clinical AI systems.
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

EEG-Xplain: Decoding Neural Black-Boxes of EEG Foundation Models

EEG foundation models such as BIOT, LaBraM, and EEGMamba have achieved remarkable performance in neural signal decoding, but their black-box nature limits clinical trust and neuroscientific validation. We propose a unified attribution framework for interpreting EEG foundation models across heterogeneous architectures. The framework integrates gradient-, perturbation-, and activation-based explanation methods to analyze model behavior in spatial, temporal, and frequency dimensions. Spatially, it identifies critical EEG channels and visualizes their distributions using topographic maps. Temporally, it highlights decision-relevant signal segments through attribution heatmaps. In the frequency domain, it quantifies the contributions of canonical EEG rhythms via spectral perturbation analysis. To assess explanation reliability, we introduce a population-level evaluation combining Area Over the Perturbation Curve (AOPC) and cross-method consistency analysis. The framework further leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform structured attribution outputs into natural-language reports, bridging low-level neural representations and high-level semantic reasoning. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Mumtaz2016 and TUAB, demonstrate that the generated explanations are consistent with established neurophysiological markers, validating meaningful neural representations while exposing potential dependencies on artifacts and spurious patterns. The proposed framework provides a standardized approach for evaluating the interpretability, reliability, and physiological plausibility of EEG foundation models.
Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

Decomposition of Evidence, Contradiction, and Fragility in Perturbation Responses

Perturbation methods explain model decisions by measuring prediction changes under altered inputs, but response magnitude tells us only how much a model reacts, not what that reaction means. The same magnitude can support the final factual-counterfactual difference, oppose it, or arise strongly along the perturbation path yet vanish at the endpoint. We therefore track how the contrast develops as paired inputs are progressively revealed, using the final contrast to interpret the trajectory. We introduce DECAF (Decomposition of Evidence, Contradiction, And Fragility), which routes aligned, opposed, and endpoint-null responses into evidence E, contradiction C, and fragility F. The decomposition preserves ordinary magnitude exactly, Abs = E + C + F, and is unique under endpoint-relative axioms. Across controlled vision and tabular settings, the three components track independently measured behavior. In a 72-model ImageNet-9 audit, we compare cases with nearly identical response magnitude but different independently measured behaviors. The largest DECAF component agrees with an observed behavior in 96.4% of cases, compared with 35.0% for magnitude alone. Changing only the reveal path increases total response by nearly 80%, yet evidence barely changes while fragility grows by more than 4x. On FunnyBirds and ImageNet-1k, short forward-only DECAF trajectories outperform the tested general-purpose attribution baselines. On a 1B-scale DINOv2 model, a short trajectory matches a strong gradient-based baseline with 4.75x lower wall time and 2.36x lower peak memory.
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

On the Disagreement in Perturbation-based xAI -- Benchmarking Perturbation Choices for Flood Detection from SAR Images

Perturbation-based xAI methods are widely used to analyze the behavior and predictions of deep learning models. By altering input regions and measuring the resulting changes in class probabilities with respect to the original image, they assign relevance scores and generate heatmaps that reflect each region's contribution to the prediction. Despite their apparent simplicity, however, perturbation-based methods are sensitive to parameter choices. In this work, we focus on two key parameters of the perturbation pipeline, namely the patch geometry, including the size and shape of the perturbed regions, and the perturbation type, defined by the replacement scheme. Grounded in the use case of flood detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of how relevance estimation changes under different perturbation settings. Beyond visual inspection of the resulting relevance maps, we evaluate their consistency across perturbation strategies and their faithfulness to the model's reasoning. We demonstrate how different perturbation choices can steer the resulting relevance maps, yielding ambiguous and even contradictory explanations. Our findings emphasize the importance of methodological settings in perturbation-based xAI. They underscore the need to carefully inspect and evaluate perturbation choices and to treat them as an integral part when interpreting explanations, ensuring a robust understanding of both the explanations and model predictions.
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

Local Additive Feature Attribution: A Mathematical Taxonomy and Reporting Checklist

Feature-attribution methods are central to explainable artificial intelligence. Their assumptions are expressed in several mathematical languages: cooperative-game values, path integrals, gradient operators, perturbation distributions, and backpropagation rules. This survey proposes a common framework for local additive feature attribution. It organizes Shapley, path-based, gradient/backpropagation, perturbation, and CAM-style methods around five specification choices: value function, reference, path, perturbation distribution, and conservation rule. It then compares these methods through an axiom-by-method matrix and links common failure modes, including baseline sensitivity, off-manifold perturbations, sanity-check failures, adversarial manipulation, and method disagreement, to the assumptions that produce them. Finally, the survey proposes a ten-item reporting checklist for studies that use local additive attributions. The central message is that attribution results are meaningful only relative to the mathematical assumptions under which they are defined, and that those assumptions should be reported.
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

A Good Initialization is All You Need for Faithful Visual Attribution

Faithful visual attribution identifies which image regions support a model prediction. Search-based perturbation methods lead the insertion--deletion faithfulness frontier by masking regions and measuring score changes, but they usually output a complete ordering of all regions. Many applications, especially MLLM attribution and repair, only need a compact top-kk evidence mask. We study this mask-first attribution problem. An exactly kk-region mask is combinatorial: useful evidence can depend on interactions among fine regions. Coarse grouping can stabilize early search but aggregates redundant content, whereas one-step scoring can miss high-value combinations. We introduce two forward-only methods. \textsc{CoPAIR} uses a PhaseWin--Greedy gap diagnosis to construct coarse singleton/pair candidates that warm-start full-ordering search. \textsc{TRACE} directly searches fixed-cardinality fine-region masks with cross-entropy sampling, elite retention, and distribution updates, with a finite-budget recovery analysis. The resulting evidence set can be returned as a compact attribution mask or used to initialize Greedy or PhaseWin when a complete ranking is required. Across ImageNet classification with CLIP ViT-L/14, CLIP RN101, and ResNet-101, our initialized search methods establish a new state-of-the-art frontier for faithful full-ordering attribution under inclusive forward-call accounting. On POPE and RePOPE with Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct and LLaVA-v1.5-7B, \textsc{TRACE}+Greedy gives the strongest search-based MLLM attribution results. Direct \textsc{TRACE} masks further achieve single-point RePOPE repair rates of 94.44%94.44\% and 96.00%96.00\%, showing that compact evidence masks can be actionable attribution outputs, not merely prefixes of full rankings.
Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

Re-Ranking Through an Attribution Lens for Citation Quality in Legal QA

Retrieval-augmented generation systems for legal question answering typically retrieve passages based on semantic similarity and provide them to a language model, which then generates cited answers. Prior work assumes that highly ranked passages are most likely to be usefully cited by the model. Perturbation-based attribution methods, such as C-LIME, have been used exclusively for post-hoc explanation. However, on the AQuAECHR benchmark, semantic similarity does not correlate with passage attribution. Within a retriever's candidate pool, similarity-based ranking performs worse than random selection at surfacing gold citation paragraphs. To address this limitation, a lightweight cross-encoder is trained on continuous perturbation-based attribution scores to re-rank passages prior to generation. This approach is evaluated on the AQuAECHR benchmark, using two language models and five-fold cross-validation. The re-ranker substantially improves citation faithfulness and alignment with gold expert answers. Notably, two re-rankers trained independently on different models converge beyond their raw attribution agreement. This finding indicates that the cross-encoder reduces model-specific noise and produces a shared relevance signal that partially transfers across models, although same-model re-ranking remains more effective. These results demonstrate that perturbation-based attribution provides a practical, model-agnostic training signal for citation-aware retrieval.
May 18, 2026cs.AI

Learning Quantifiable Visual Explanations Without Ground-Truth

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.
May 14, 2026cs.LG

From Weight Perturbation to Feature Attribution for Explaining Fully Connected Neural Networks

Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNNs) are often regarded as simple and intuitive architectures, yet they serve as the foundation for more complex models. Nonetheless, the lack of consensus on their interpretability continues to pose challenges, underscoring the enduring relevance of simpler, attribution-based approaches for understanding even the most advanced neural architectures. In this regard, we explore a novel idea for estimating feature attribution, by applying perturbation to the features' attached weights instead of their values. This method offers a fresh perspective aimed at mitigating common limitations in Occlusion techniques, such as Added Bias and Out-of-Distribution data. The application of this rule leads to the formation of a pair of novel attribution methods we call XWP and XWP_c. Founded on simple rules, our methods achieve competitive performance in identifying image signals for simple DNNs, competing with the most established attribution methods on standard baseline metrics. Our work thus contributes to the field of Explainability by introducing a robust framework that paves the way for addressing these long-standing vulnerabilities, and leads to more reliable and interpretable model explanations.
May 12, 2026cs.CV

FAME: Feature Activation Map Explanation on Image Classification and Face Recognition

Deep Learning has revolutionized machine learning, reaching unprecedented levels of accuracy, but at the cost of reduced interpretability. Especially in image processing systems, deep networks transform local pixel information into more global concepts in a highly obscured manner. Explainable AI methods for image processing try to shed light on this issue by highlighting the regions of the image that are important for the prediction task. Among these, Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and its gradient-based variants compute attributions based on the feature map and upscale them to the image resolution, assuming that feature map locations are influenced only by underlying regions. Perturbation-based methods, such as CorrRISE, on the other hand, try to provide pixel-level attributions by perturbing the input with fixed patches and checking how the output of the network changes. In this work, we propose Feature Activation Map Explanation (FAME), which combines both worlds by using network gradients to compute changes to the input image, manipulating it in a gradient-driven way rather than using fixed patches. We apply this technique on two common tasks, image classification and face recognition, and show that CAM's above-mentioned assumption does not hold for deeper networks. We qualitatively and quantitively show that FAME produces attribution maps that are competitive state-of-the-art systems. Our code is available: {\footnotesize https://github.com/AIML-IfI/fame.}
May 7, 2026cs.CV

BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Grounding

GUI grounding is a critical capability for enabling GUI agents to execute tasks such as clicking and dragging. However, in complex scenarios like the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, existing models often suffer from suboptimal performance. Utilizing the proposed \textbf{Masked Prediction Distribution (MPD)} attribution method, we identify that the primary sources of errors are twofold: high image resolution (leading to precision bias) and intricate interface elements (resulting in ambiguity bias). To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{Bias-Aware Manipulation Inference (BAMI)}, which incorporates two key manipulations, coarse-to-fine focus and candidate selection, to effectively mitigate these biases. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that BAMI significantly enhances the accuracy of various GUI grounding models in a training-free setting. For instance, applying our method to the TianXi-Action-7B model boosts its accuracy on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark from 51.9% to 57.8%. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the robustness of the BAMI approach across diverse parameter configurations, highlighting its stability and effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/Neur-IO/BAMI.
Dec 15, 2025stat.ML

One Permutation Is All You Need: Fast, Deterministic Feature Importance and Model Stress-Testing

Reliable estimation of feature contributions in machine learning models is essential for transparency, algorithmic fairness, and regulatory compliance. While permutation feature importance is widely used, classical implementations rely on repeated Monte Carlo shuffling, introducing significant computational overhead and stochastic instability. In this paper, we show that replacing BB random permutations with a single, max-min rank-optimal deterministic permutation maintains or improves correlation with ground-truth importance while eliminating estimation variance and reducing complexity from O(B⋅n⋅p)O(B \cdot n \cdot p) to O(n⋅p)O(n \cdot p). Under location-scale feature distributions, we formally prove exact recovery of scale-adjusted linear regression coefficients, alongside improved importance estimation under concave model sensitivity. We extend this deterministic framework along two complementary dimensions. First, Systemic Feature Importance (SFI) integrates empirical feature correlations to quantify indirect feature reliance through proxy variables. Second, Importance Direction extends scalar importance to a signed, directional representation by measuring concordance between covariate displacements and output shifts. Extensive empirical validation across nearly 200 simulation scenarios demonstrates superior bias-variance trade-offs in high-dimensional and low signal-to-noise regimes. Finally, two real-world credit risk case studies show how coupling SFI with Importance Direction enables practitioners and regulators to audit models for both the magnitude and net sign of hidden reliance on protected attributes, delivering a principled, transparent, and scalable framework for model governance.
May 21, 2025cs.LG

Explainable embeddings with Distance Explainer

While eXplainable AI (XAI) has advanced significantly, few methods address interpretability in embedded vector spaces where dimensions represent complex abstractions. We introduce Distance Explainer, a novel method for generating local, post-hoc explanations of embedded spaces in machine learning models. Our approach adapts saliency-based techniques from RISE to explain the distance between two embedded data points by assigning attribution values through selective masking and distance-ranked mask filtering. We evaluate Distance Explainer on cross-modal embeddings (image-image and image-caption pairs) using established XAI metrics including Faithfulness, Sensitivity/Robustness, and Randomization. Experiments with ImageNet and CLIP models demonstrate that our method effectively identifies features contributing to similarity or dissimilarity between embedded data points while maintaining high robustness and consistency. We also explore how parameter tuning, particularly mask quantity and selection strategy, affects explanation quality. This work addresses a critical gap in XAI research and enhances transparency and trustworthiness in deep learning applications utilizing embedded spaces.