Benchmarking XAI Explanations with Human-Aligned Evaluations
On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Diffusion and multimodal model alignment
Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce PASTA (Perceptual Assessment System for explanaTion of Artificial Intelligence), a novel human-centric framework for evaluating eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques in computer vision. Our first contribution is the creation of the PASTA-dataset, the first large-scale benchmark that spans a diverse set of models and both saliency-based and concept-based explanation methods. This dataset enables robust, comparative analysis of XAI techniques based on human judgment. Our second contribution is an automated, data-driven benchmark that predicts human preferences using the PASTA-dataset. This scoring called PASTA-score method offers scalable, reliable, and consistent evaluation aligned with human perception. Additionally, our benchmark allows for comparisons between explanations across different modalities, an aspect previously unaddressed. We then propose to apply our scoring method to probe the interpretability of existing models and to build more human interpretable XAI methods.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and multimodal model alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 76 of its 119 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2024.
Builds on
76 of 119 references.
References · 76
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38 more
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50 most cited of 76 All 76 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 5.
8 papers.
- 2025Evaluating Neuron Explanations: A Unified Framework with Sanity Checkscited by 4
- 2025Knowing What You Cannot Explain: Learning to Reject Low-Quality Explanationscited by 2
- 2026Disentangling Hallucinations: Orthogonal Semantic Projection for Robust Interpretabilitycited by 1
- 2025Tuning for Trustworthiness -- Balancing Performance and Explanation Consistency in Neural Network Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026Structural Compactness as a Complementary Criterion for Explanation Qualitycited by 0
- 2026Improving Adversarial Robustness of Attribution via Implicit Regularizationcited by 0
- 2026Position: Explanation Stability Is a Property of the Model Method Pair, Not the Modelcited by 0
- 2026CHOQOLATE: Organizing Concept Bottleneck Latent Spaces with Choquet Integralscited by 0
- 2026CHOQOLATE: Organizing Concept Bottleneck Latent Spaces with Choquet Integrals29 Sep 2026
- 2026Position: Explanation Stability Is a Property of the Model Method Pair, Not the Model18 Jul 2026
- 2026Disentangling Hallucinations: Orthogonal Semantic Projection for Robust Interpretability8 Jun 2026
- 2026Improving Adversarial Robustness of Attribution via Implicit Regularization28 May 2026
- 2026Structural Compactness as a Complementary Criterion for Explanation Quality31 Mar 2026
- 2025Knowing What You Cannot Explain: Learning to Reject Low-Quality Explanations17 Jul 2025
- 2025Evaluating Neuron Explanations: A Unified Framework with Sanity Checks6 Jun 2025
- 2025Tuning for Trustworthiness -- Balancing Performance and Explanation Consistency in Neural Network Optimization12 May 2025
Similar, not cited
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- 2024Beyond the Veil of Similarity: Quantifying Semantic Continuity in Explainable AI
- 2023Multimodal Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Review of Methodological Advances and Future Research Directions
- 2026Adapting Vision-Language Models for Human-Readable XAI in Industrial Object Detection
- 2026QQJ: Quantifying Qualitative Judgment for Scalable and Human-Aligned Evaluation of Generative AI
- 2025Your Reasoning Benchmark May Not Test Reasoning: Revealing Perception Bottleneck in Abstract Reasoning Benchmarks
- 2025A Survey on Interpretability in Visual Recognition
- 2025Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI): from inherent explainability to large language models
- 2022Towards Human-Interpretable Prototypes for Visual Assessment of Image Classification Models