# DExT: Detector Explanation Toolkit

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11409 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11409/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [Opening the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks via Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00810/) (2017)
- [Is Attention Interpretable?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03731/) (2019)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [The elephant in the interpretability room: Why use attention as explanation when we have saliency methods?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05607/) (2020)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01451/) (2019)
- [Toward Transformer-Based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09958/) (2020)
- [Explainability of deep vision-based autonomous driving systems: Review and challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05307/) (2021)
- [Black-box Explanation of Object Detectors via Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03204/) (2020)
- [Single Shot Text Detector with Regional Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00138/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ODExAI: A Comprehensive Object Detection Explainable AI Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19249/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Incremental Explanations for Object Detectors in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11963/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art object detectors are treated as black boxes due to their highly non-linear internal computations. Even with unprecedented advancements in detector performance, the inability to explain how their outputs are generated limits their use in safety-critical applications. Previous work fails to produce explanations for both bounding box and classification decisions, and generally make individual explanations for various detectors. In this paper, we propose an open-source Detector Explanation Toolkit (DExT) which implements the proposed approach to generate a holistic explanation for all detector decisions using certain gradient-based explanation methods. We suggests various multi-object visualization methods to merge the explanations of multiple objects detected in an image as well as the corresponding detections in a single image. The quantitative evaluation show that the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) is more faithfully explained compared to other detectors regardless of the explanation methods. Both quantitative and human-centric evaluations identify that SmoothGrad with Guided Backpropagation (GBP) provides more trustworthy explanations among selected methods across all detectors. We expect that DExT will motivate practitioners to evaluate object detectors from the interpretability perspective by explaining both bounding box and classification decisions.