# Attention Lattice Adapter: Visual Explanation Generation for Visual Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14664/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6806/) (2014)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Side Adapter Network for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12242/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Neural Network Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14261/) (2020)
- [Layer-wise Relevance Propagation for Neural Networks with Local Renormalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00825/) (2016)
- [Interpreting CLIP's Image Representation via Text-Based Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05916/) (2023)
- [Full-Gradient Representation for Neural Network Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00780/) (2019)
- [IA-RED2: Interpretability-Aware Redundancy Reduction for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12620/) (2021)
- [Attention Branch Network: Learning of Attention Mechanism for Visual Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10025/) (2018)
- [Large-scale Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03149/) (2021)
- [XAI for Transformers: Better Explanations through Conservative Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07304/) (2022)
- [Explaining Recurrent Neural Network Predictions in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07206/) (2017)
- [Improving Deep Learning Interpretability by Saliency Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14338/) (2021)
- [A Review on Explainability in Multimodal Deep Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07878/) (2021)
- [Visual Explanations of Image-Text Representations via Multi-Modal Information Bottleneck Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17174/) (2023)
- [Visual Explanation using Attention Mechanism in Actor-Critic-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04067/) (2021)
- [Predicting and Attending to Damaging Collisions for Placing Everyday Objects in Photo-Realistic Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06507/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this study, we consider the problem of generating visual explanations in visual foundation models. Numerous methods have been proposed for this purpose; however, they often cannot be applied to complex models due to their lack of adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel explanation generation method in visual foundation models that is aimed at both generating explanations and partially updating model parameters to enhance interpretability. Our approach introduces two novel mechanisms: Attention Lattice Adapter (ALA) and Alternating Epoch Architect (AEA). ALA mechanism simplifies the process by eliminating the need for manual layer selection, thus enhancing the model's adaptability and interpretability. Moreover, the AEA mechanism, which updates ALA's parameters every other epoch, effectively addresses the common issue of overly small attention regions. We evaluated our method on two benchmark datasets, CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-S. Our results showed that our method outperformed the baseline methods in terms of mean intersection over union (IoU), insertion score, deletion score, and insertion-deletion score on both the CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-S datasets. Notably, our best model achieved a 53.2-point improvement in mean IoU on the CUB-200-2011 dataset compared with the baselines.