# Spatial Information Bottleneck for Interpretable Visual Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09239 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09239/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [Right for the Right Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03717/) (2017)
- [Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04213/) (2023)
- [Feature relevance quantification in explainable AI: A causal problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13413/) (2019)
- [What I Cannot Predict, I Do Not Understand: A Human-Centered Evaluation Framework for Explainability Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04417/) (2021)
- [Interpretable Image Classification with Differentiable Prototypes Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02902/) (2021)
- [Beyond Explaining: Opportunities and Challenges of XAI-Based Model Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08008/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks typically learn spatially entangled representations that conflate discriminative foreground features with spurious background correlations, thereby undermining model interpretability and robustness. We propose a novel understanding framework for gradient-based attribution from an information-theoretic perspective. We prove that, under mild conditions, the Vector-Jacobian Products (VJP) computed during backpropagation form minimal sufficient statistics of input features with respect to class labels. Motivated by this finding, we propose an encoding-decoding perspective : forward propagation encodes inputs into class space, while VJP in backpropagation decodes this encoding back to feature space. Therefore, we propose Spatial Information Bottleneck (S-IB) to spatially disentangle information flow. By maximizing mutual information between foreground VJP and inputs while minimizing mutual information in background regions, S-IB encourages networks to encode information only in class-relevant spatial regions. Since post-hoc explanation methods fundamentally derive from VJP computations, directly optimizing VJP's spatial structure during training improves visualization quality across diverse explanation paradigms. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate universal improvements across six explanation methods, achieving better foreground concentration and background suppression without method-specific tuning, alongside consistent classification accuracy gains.