# Reproducibility study of "LICO: Explainable Models with Language-Image Consistency"

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13989/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [Interpretable machine learning: definitions, methods, and applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04592/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Neural Network Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14261/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Why did you say that?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07450/) (2016)
- [PartImageNet: A Large, High-Quality Dataset of Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00933/) (2021)
- [Leakage and the Reproducibility Crisis in ML-based Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07048/) (2022)
- [Group-CAM: Group Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13859/) (2021)
- [Learning Soft Labels via Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09496/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Metric-Guided Synthesis of Class Activation Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09998/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing reproducibility crisis in machine learning has brought forward a need for careful examination of research findings. This paper investigates the claims made by Lei et al. (2023) regarding their proposed method, LICO, for enhancing post-hoc interpretability techniques and improving image classification performance. LICO leverages natural language supervision from a vision-language model to enrich feature representations and guide the learning process. We conduct a comprehensive reproducibility study, employing (Wide) ResNets and established interpretability methods like Grad-CAM and RISE. We were mostly unable to reproduce the authors' results. In particular, we did not find that LICO consistently led to improved classification performance or improvements in quantitative and qualitative measures of interpretability. Thus, our findings highlight the importance of rigorous evaluation and transparent reporting in interpretability research.