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Main Authors: Luque-Cerpa, Alejandro, Polgreen, Elizabeth, Rajan, Ajitha, Torfah, Hazem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09998
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author Luque-Cerpa, Alejandro
Polgreen, Elizabeth
Rajan, Ajitha
Torfah, Hazem
author_facet Luque-Cerpa, Alejandro
Polgreen, Elizabeth
Rajan, Ajitha
Torfah, Hazem
contents Class activation mapping (CAM) is a widely adopted class of saliency methods used to explain the behavior of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These methods generate heatmaps that highlight the parts of the input most relevant to the CNN output. Various CAM methods have been proposed, each distinguished by the expressions used to derive heatmaps. In general, users look for heatmaps with specific properties that reflect different aspects of CNN functionality. These may include similarity to ground truth, robustness, equivariance, and more. Although existing CAM methods implicitly encode some of these properties in their expressions, they do not allow for variability in heatmap generation following the user's intent or domain knowledge. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SyCAM, a metric-based approach for synthesizing CAM expressions. Given a predefined evaluation metric for saliency maps, SyCAM automatically generates CAM expressions optimized for that metric. We specifically explore a syntax-guided synthesis instantiation of SyCAM, where CAM expressions are derived based on predefined syntactic constraints and the given metric. Using several established evaluation metrics, we demonstrate the efficacy and flexibility of our approach in generating targeted heatmaps. We compare SyCAM with other well-known CAM methods on three prominent models: ResNet50, VGG16, and VGG19.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09998
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Metric-Guided Synthesis of Class Activation Mapping
Luque-Cerpa, Alejandro
Polgreen, Elizabeth
Rajan, Ajitha
Torfah, Hazem
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Class activation mapping (CAM) is a widely adopted class of saliency methods used to explain the behavior of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These methods generate heatmaps that highlight the parts of the input most relevant to the CNN output. Various CAM methods have been proposed, each distinguished by the expressions used to derive heatmaps. In general, users look for heatmaps with specific properties that reflect different aspects of CNN functionality. These may include similarity to ground truth, robustness, equivariance, and more. Although existing CAM methods implicitly encode some of these properties in their expressions, they do not allow for variability in heatmap generation following the user's intent or domain knowledge. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SyCAM, a metric-based approach for synthesizing CAM expressions. Given a predefined evaluation metric for saliency maps, SyCAM automatically generates CAM expressions optimized for that metric. We specifically explore a syntax-guided synthesis instantiation of SyCAM, where CAM expressions are derived based on predefined syntactic constraints and the given metric. Using several established evaluation metrics, we demonstrate the efficacy and flexibility of our approach in generating targeted heatmaps. We compare SyCAM with other well-known CAM methods on three prominent models: ResNet50, VGG16, and VGG19.
title Metric-Guided Synthesis of Class Activation Mapping
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09998