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Main Authors: Wall, Casey, Wang, Longwei, Rizk, Rodrigue, Santosh, KC
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10846
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author Wall, Casey
Wang, Longwei
Rizk, Rodrigue
Santosh, KC
author_facet Wall, Casey
Wang, Longwei
Rizk, Rodrigue
Santosh, KC
contents Interpreting Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is critical for safety-sensitive applications such as healthcare and autonomous systems. Popular visual explanation methods like Grad-CAM use a single convolutional layer, potentially missing multi-scale cues and producing unstable saliency maps. We introduce Winsor-CAM, a single-pass gradient-based method that aggregates Grad-CAM maps from all convolutional layers and applies percentile-based Winsorization to attenuate outlier contributions. A user-controllable percentile parameter p enables semantic-level tuning from low-level textures to high-level object patterns. We evaluate Winsor-CAM on six CNN architectures using PASCAL VOC 2012 and PolypGen, comparing localization (IoU, center-of-mass distance) and fidelity (insertion/deletion AUC) against seven baselines including Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, LayerCAM, ScoreCAM, AblationCAM, ShapleyCAM, and FullGrad. On DenseNet121 with a subset of Pascal VOC 2012, Winsor-CAM achieves 46.8% IoU and 0.059 CoM distance versus 39.0% and 0.074 for Grad-CAM, with improved insertion AUC (0.656 vs. 0.623) and deletion AUC (0.197 vs. 0.242). Notably, even the worst-performing fixed p-value configuration outperforms FullGrad across all metrics. An ablation study confirms that incorporating earlier layers improves localization. Similar evaluation on PolypGen polyp segmentation further validates Winsor-CAM's effectiveness in medical imaging contexts. Winsor-CAM provides an efficient, robust, and human-tunable explanation tool for expert-in-the-loop analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10846
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Winsor-CAM: Human-Tunable Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Layer-Wise Winsorization
Wall, Casey
Wang, Longwei
Rizk, Rodrigue
Santosh, KC
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Interpreting Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is critical for safety-sensitive applications such as healthcare and autonomous systems. Popular visual explanation methods like Grad-CAM use a single convolutional layer, potentially missing multi-scale cues and producing unstable saliency maps. We introduce Winsor-CAM, a single-pass gradient-based method that aggregates Grad-CAM maps from all convolutional layers and applies percentile-based Winsorization to attenuate outlier contributions. A user-controllable percentile parameter p enables semantic-level tuning from low-level textures to high-level object patterns. We evaluate Winsor-CAM on six CNN architectures using PASCAL VOC 2012 and PolypGen, comparing localization (IoU, center-of-mass distance) and fidelity (insertion/deletion AUC) against seven baselines including Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, LayerCAM, ScoreCAM, AblationCAM, ShapleyCAM, and FullGrad. On DenseNet121 with a subset of Pascal VOC 2012, Winsor-CAM achieves 46.8% IoU and 0.059 CoM distance versus 39.0% and 0.074 for Grad-CAM, with improved insertion AUC (0.656 vs. 0.623) and deletion AUC (0.197 vs. 0.242). Notably, even the worst-performing fixed p-value configuration outperforms FullGrad across all metrics. An ablation study confirms that incorporating earlier layers improves localization. Similar evaluation on PolypGen polyp segmentation further validates Winsor-CAM's effectiveness in medical imaging contexts. Winsor-CAM provides an efficient, robust, and human-tunable explanation tool for expert-in-the-loop analysis.
title Winsor-CAM: Human-Tunable Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Layer-Wise Winsorization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10846