Large-scale diffusion models have made significant advances in image generation, particularly through cross-attention mechanisms. While cross-attention has been well-studied in text-to-image tasks, their interpretability in image-to-image (I2I) diffusion models remains underexplored. This paper introduces Image-to-Image Attribution Maps $(\textbf{I}^2\textbf{AM})$, a method that enhances the interpretability of I2I models by visualizing bidirectional attribution maps, from the reference image to the generated image and vice versa. $\text{I}^2\text{AM}$ aggregates cross-attention scores across time steps, attention heads, and layers, offering insights into how critical features are transferred between images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of $\text{I}^2\text{AM}$ across object detection, inpainting, and super-resolution tasks. Our results demonstrate that $\text{I}^2\text{AM}$ successfully identifies key regions responsible for generating the output, even in complex scenes. Additionally, we introduce the Inpainting Mask Attention Consistency Score (IMACS) as a novel evaluation metric to assess the alignment between attribution maps and inpainting masks, which correlates strongly with existing performance metrics. Through extensive experiments, we show that $\text{I}^2\text{AM}$ enables model debugging and refinement, providing practical tools for improving I2I model's performance and interpretability.
Keywords: Image-to-Image Diffusion Model, Interpretable AI, Explainable AI, Image Attribution
Abstract:
Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.
Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2025/AuthorGuide.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Submission Number: 5933
Loading