Now you see me! Attribution Distributions Reveal What is Truly Important for a Prediction

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13378 Authors

Keywords: Explainability, Attribution, Saliency Maps, Interpretability

Abstract:

Neural networks are regularly employed in high-stakes decision-making, where understanding and transparency is key. Attribution methods have been developed to gain understanding into which input features neural networks use for a specific prediction. Although widely used in computer vision, these methods often result in unspecific saliency maps that fail to identify the relevant information that led to a decision,
supported by different benchmarks results. Here, we revisit the common attribution pipeline and identify one cause for the lack of specificity in attributions as the computation of attribution of isolated logits. Instead, we suggest to combine attributions of multiple class logits in analogy to how the softmax combines the information across logits. By computing probability distributions of attributions over classes for each spatial location in the image, we unleash the true capabilities of existing attribution methods,
revealing better object- and instance-specificity and uncovering discriminative as well as shared features between classes.
On common benchmarks, including the grid-pointing game and randomization-based sanity checks, we show that this reconsideration of *how and where* we compute attributions across the network improves established attribution methods while staying agnostic to model architectures.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 13378