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Hauptverfasser: Essafouri, Younes, Raynaud, Laure, Drozda, Luciano, Risser, Laurent
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22580
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author Essafouri, Younes
Raynaud, Laure
Drozda, Luciano
Risser, Laurent
author_facet Essafouri, Younes
Raynaud, Laure
Drozda, Luciano
Risser, Laurent
contents As the demand to integrate Artificial Intelligence into high-stakes environments continues to grow, explaining the reasoning behind neural-network predictions has shifted from a theoretical curiosity to a strict operational requirement. Our work is motivated by the explanations of autoregressive neural predictions on dynamic physical fields, as in weather forecasting. Gradient-based feature attribution methods are widely used to explain the predictions on such data, in particular due to their scalability to high-dimensional inputs. It is also interesting to remark that gradient-based techniques such as SmoothGrad are now standard on images to robustify the explanations using pointwise averages of the attribution maps obtained from several noised inputs. Our goal is to efficiently adapt this aggregation strategy to dynamic physical fields. To do so, our first contribution is to identify a fundamental failure mode when averaging perturbed attribution maps on dynamic physical fields: stochastic input perturbations do not induce stationary amplitude noise in attribution maps, but instead cause a geometric displacement of the attributions. Consequently, pointwise averaging blurs these spatially misaligned features. To tackle this issue, we introduce WassersteinGrad, which extracts a geometric consensus of perturbed attribution maps by computing their entropic Wasserstein barycenter. The results, obtained on regional weather data and a meteorologist-validated neural model, demonstrate promising explainability properties of WassersteinGrad over gradient-based baselines across both single-step and autoregressive forecasting settings.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explanation of Dynamic Physical Field Predictions using WassersteinGrad: Application to Autoregressive Weather Forecasting
Essafouri, Younes
Raynaud, Laure
Drozda, Luciano
Risser, Laurent
Machine Learning
As the demand to integrate Artificial Intelligence into high-stakes environments continues to grow, explaining the reasoning behind neural-network predictions has shifted from a theoretical curiosity to a strict operational requirement. Our work is motivated by the explanations of autoregressive neural predictions on dynamic physical fields, as in weather forecasting. Gradient-based feature attribution methods are widely used to explain the predictions on such data, in particular due to their scalability to high-dimensional inputs. It is also interesting to remark that gradient-based techniques such as SmoothGrad are now standard on images to robustify the explanations using pointwise averages of the attribution maps obtained from several noised inputs. Our goal is to efficiently adapt this aggregation strategy to dynamic physical fields. To do so, our first contribution is to identify a fundamental failure mode when averaging perturbed attribution maps on dynamic physical fields: stochastic input perturbations do not induce stationary amplitude noise in attribution maps, but instead cause a geometric displacement of the attributions. Consequently, pointwise averaging blurs these spatially misaligned features. To tackle this issue, we introduce WassersteinGrad, which extracts a geometric consensus of perturbed attribution maps by computing their entropic Wasserstein barycenter. The results, obtained on regional weather data and a meteorologist-validated neural model, demonstrate promising explainability properties of WassersteinGrad over gradient-based baselines across both single-step and autoregressive forecasting settings.
title Explanation of Dynamic Physical Field Predictions using WassersteinGrad: Application to Autoregressive Weather Forecasting
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22580