# Reliable or Deceptive? Investigating Gated Features for Smooth Visual Explanations in CNNs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19341/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Interpretable Explanations of Black Boxes by Meaningful Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03296/) (2017)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Real Time Image Saliency for Black Box Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07857/) (2017)
- [Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02312/) (2020)
- [Explaining Image Classifiers by Counterfactual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08024/) (2018)
- [Smooth Grad-CAM++: An Enhanced Inference Level Visualization Technique for Deep Convolutional Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01224/) (2019)
- [When Does Self-supervision Improve Few-shot Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03560/) (2019)
- [Interpretable and Fine-Grained Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02686/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning models have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. However, the intricate nature of these models often impedes a clear understanding of their decision-making processes. This is where Explainable AI (XAI) becomes indispensable, offering intuitive explanations for model decisions. In this work, we propose a simple yet highly effective approach, ScoreCAM++, which introduces modifications to enhance the promising ScoreCAM method for visual explainability. Our proposed approach involves altering the normalization function within the activation layer utilized in ScoreCAM, resulting in significantly improved results compared to previous efforts. Additionally, we apply an activation function to the upsampled activation layers to enhance interpretability. This improvement is achieved by selectively gating lower-priority values within the activation layer. Through extensive experiments and qualitative comparisons, we demonstrate that ScoreCAM++ consistently achieves notably superior performance and fairness in interpreting the decision-making process compared to both ScoreCAM and previous methods.