# DEXTER: Diffusion-Guided EXplanations with TExtual Reasoning for Vision Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14741 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14741/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 11 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Correct-N-Contrast: A Contrastive Approach for Improving Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01517/) (2022)
- [e-ViL: A Dataset and Benchmark for Natural Language Explanations in Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03761/) (2021)
- [Distributionally Robust Optimization: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05659/) (2019)
- [NLX-GPT: A Model for Natural Language Explanations in Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05081/) (2022)
- [Uni-NLX: Unifying Textual Explanations for Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09033/) (2023)
- [LADDER: Language-Driven Slice Discovery and Error Rectification in Vision Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07832/) (2024)
- [Diffexplainer: Towards Cross-modal Global Explanations with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02618/) (2024)
- [Plug & Play Generative Networks: Conditional Iterative Generation of Images in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00005/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Distributional View for Visual Mechanistic Interpretability: KL-Minimal Soft-Constraint Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17504/) (2026)
- [DriftScope: Measuring The Hidden Effects of Diffusion Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00183/) (2026)
- [UNBOX: Unveiling Black-box visual models with Natural-language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08639/) (2026)
- [LINE: LLM-based Iterative Neuron Explanations for Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08039/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding and explaining the behavior of machine learning models is essential for building transparent and trustworthy AI systems. We introduce DEXTER, a data-free framework that employs diffusion models and large language models to generate global, textual explanations of visual classifiers. DEXTER operates by optimizing text prompts to synthesize class-conditional images that strongly activate a target classifier. These synthetic samples are then used to elicit detailed natural language reports that describe class-specific decision patterns and biases. Unlike prior work, DEXTER enables natural language explanation about a classifier's decision process without access to training data or ground-truth labels. We demonstrate DEXTER's flexibility across three tasks-activation maximization, slice discovery and debiasing, and bias explanation-each illustrating its ability to uncover the internal mechanisms of visual classifiers. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including a user study, show that DEXTER produces accurate, interpretable outputs. Experiments on ImageNet, Waterbirds, CelebA, and FairFaces confirm that DEXTER outperforms existing approaches in global model explanation and class-level bias reporting. Code is available at https://github.com/perceivelab/dexter.