Visual Explanation via Similar Feature Activation for Metric Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liao, Yi, Akpudo, Ugochukwu Ejike, Zhang, Jue, Gao, Yongsheng, Zhou, Jun, Zeng, Wenyi, Zhang, Weichuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915697469161472
author Liao, Yi
Akpudo, Ugochukwu Ejike
Zhang, Jue
Gao, Yongsheng
Zhou, Jun
Zeng, Wenyi
Zhang, Weichuan
author_facet Liao, Yi
Akpudo, Ugochukwu Ejike
Zhang, Jue
Gao, Yongsheng
Zhou, Jun
Zeng, Wenyi
Zhang, Weichuan
contents Visual explanation maps enhance the trustworthiness of decisions made by deep learning models and offer valuable guidance for developing new algorithms in image recognition tasks. Class activation maps (CAM) and their variants (e.g., Grad-CAM and Relevance-CAM) have been extensively employed to explore the interpretability of softmax-based convolutional neural networks, which require a fully connected layer as the classifier for decision-making. However, these methods cannot be directly applied to metric learning models, as such models lack a fully connected layer functioning as a classifier. To address this limitation, we propose a novel visual explanation method termed Similar Feature Activation Map (SFAM). This method introduces the channel-wise contribution importance score (CIS) to measure feature importance, derived from the similarity measurement between two image embeddings. The explanation map is constructed by linearly combining the proposed importance weights with the feature map from a CNN model. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that SFAM provides highly promising interpretable visual explanations for CNN models using Euclidean distance or cosine similarity as the similarity metric.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_01636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual Explanation via Similar Feature Activation for Metric Learning
Liao, Yi
Akpudo, Ugochukwu Ejike
Zhang, Jue
Gao, Yongsheng
Zhou, Jun
Zeng, Wenyi
Zhang, Weichuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Visual explanation maps enhance the trustworthiness of decisions made by deep learning models and offer valuable guidance for developing new algorithms in image recognition tasks. Class activation maps (CAM) and their variants (e.g., Grad-CAM and Relevance-CAM) have been extensively employed to explore the interpretability of softmax-based convolutional neural networks, which require a fully connected layer as the classifier for decision-making. However, these methods cannot be directly applied to metric learning models, as such models lack a fully connected layer functioning as a classifier. To address this limitation, we propose a novel visual explanation method termed Similar Feature Activation Map (SFAM). This method introduces the channel-wise contribution importance score (CIS) to measure feature importance, derived from the similarity measurement between two image embeddings. The explanation map is constructed by linearly combining the proposed importance weights with the feature map from a CNN model. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that SFAM provides highly promising interpretable visual explanations for CNN models using Euclidean distance or cosine similarity as the similarity metric.
title Visual Explanation via Similar Feature Activation for Metric Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01636