# ODExAI: A Comprehensive Object Detection Explainable AI Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Top-down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00507/) (2016)
- [From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods: A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08164/) (2022)
- [Quantus: An Explainable AI Toolkit for Responsible Evaluation of Neural Network Explanations and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06861/) (2022)
- [One Explanation Does Not Fit All: A Toolkit and Taxonomy of AI Explainability Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03012/) (2019)
- [Ground Truth Evaluation of Neural Network Explanations with CLEVR-XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07258/) (2020)
- [Black-box Explanation of Object Detectors via Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03204/) (2020)
- [Unbox the Black-box for the Medical Explainable AI via Multi-modal and Multi-centre Data Fusion: A Mini-Review, Two Showcases and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01998/) (2021)
- [General Pitfalls of Model-Agnostic Interpretation Methods for Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04131/) (2020)
- [Metrics for saliency map evaluation of deep learning explanation methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13291/) (2022)
- [Group-CAM: Group Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13859/) (2021)
- [Finding the right XAI method -- A Guide for the Evaluation and Ranking of Explainable AI Methods in Climate Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00652/) (2023)
- [Evaluating explainable artificial intelligence methods for multi-label deep learning classification tasks in remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01375/) (2021)
- [Towards Better Explanations for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02744/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Motion2Meaning: A Clinician-Centered Framework for Contestable LLM in Parkinson's Disease Gait Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08934/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Explainability in Safety-Critical ATR Systems: Limitations of Post-Hoc Methods and Paths Toward Robust XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05748/) (2026)
- [Multi-Dimensional Model Integrity and Responsibility Assessment Index and Scoring Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14550/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques for interpreting object detection models remain in an early stage, with no established standards for systematic evaluation. This absence of consensus hinders both the comparative analysis of methods and the informed selection of suitable approaches. To address this gap, we introduce the Object Detection Explainable AI Evaluation (ODExAI), a comprehensive framework designed to assess XAI methods in object detection based on three core dimensions: localization accuracy, faithfulness to model behavior, and computational complexity. We benchmark a set of XAI methods across two widely used object detectors (YOLOX and Faster R-CNN) and standard datasets (MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC). Empirical results demonstrate that region-based methods (e.g., D-CLOSE) achieve strong localization (PG = 88.49%) and high model faithfulness (OA = 0.863), though with substantial computational overhead (Time = 71.42s). On the other hand, CAM-based methods (e.g., G-CAME) achieve superior localization (PG = 96.13%) and significantly lower runtime (Time = 0.54s), but at the expense of reduced faithfulness (OA = 0.549). These findings demonstrate critical trade-offs among existing XAI approaches and reinforce the need for task-specific evaluation when deploying them in object detection pipelines. Our implementation and evaluation benchmarks are publicly available at: https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/odexai.