Uncertainty-Aware Subset Selection for Robust Visual Explainability under Distribution Shifts

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Gupta, Madhav, C, Vishak Prasad, Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Gupta, Madhav
C, Vishak Prasad
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
author_facet Gupta, Madhav
C, Vishak Prasad
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
contents Subset selection-based methods are widely used to explain deep vision models: they attribute predictions by highlighting the most influential image regions and support object-level explanations. While these methods perform well in in-distribution (ID) settings, their behavior under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions remains poorly understood. Through extensive experiments across multiple ID-OOD sets, we find that reliability of the existing subset based methods degrades markedly, yielding redundant, unstable, and uncertainty-sensitive explanations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a framework that combines submodular subset selection with layer-wise, gradient-based uncertainty estimation to improve robustness and fidelity without requiring additional training or auxiliary models. Our approach estimates uncertainty via adaptive weight perturbations and uses these estimates to guide submodular optimization, ensuring diverse and informative subset selection. Empirical evaluations show that, beyond mitigating the weaknesses of existing methods under OOD scenarios, our framework also yields improvements in ID settings. These findings highlight limitations of current subset-based approaches and demonstrate how uncertainty-driven optimization can enhance attribution and object-level interpretability, paving the way for more transparent and trustworthy AI in real-world vision applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08445
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncertainty-Aware Subset Selection for Robust Visual Explainability under Distribution Shifts
Gupta, Madhav
C, Vishak Prasad
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Subset selection-based methods are widely used to explain deep vision models: they attribute predictions by highlighting the most influential image regions and support object-level explanations. While these methods perform well in in-distribution (ID) settings, their behavior under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions remains poorly understood. Through extensive experiments across multiple ID-OOD sets, we find that reliability of the existing subset based methods degrades markedly, yielding redundant, unstable, and uncertainty-sensitive explanations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a framework that combines submodular subset selection with layer-wise, gradient-based uncertainty estimation to improve robustness and fidelity without requiring additional training or auxiliary models. Our approach estimates uncertainty via adaptive weight perturbations and uses these estimates to guide submodular optimization, ensuring diverse and informative subset selection. Empirical evaluations show that, beyond mitigating the weaknesses of existing methods under OOD scenarios, our framework also yields improvements in ID settings. These findings highlight limitations of current subset-based approaches and demonstrate how uncertainty-driven optimization can enhance attribution and object-level interpretability, paving the way for more transparent and trustworthy AI in real-world vision applications.
title Uncertainty-Aware Subset Selection for Robust Visual Explainability under Distribution Shifts
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08445