# UbiQVision: Quantifying Uncertainty in XAI for Image Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20288/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 108 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11279/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02312/) (2020)
- [Trustworthy clinical AI solutions: a unified review of uncertainty quantification in deep learning models for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03736/) (2022)
- [A Review of Uncertainty Estimation and its Application in Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08119/) (2023)
- [GANterfactual - Counterfactual Explanations for Medical Non-Experts using Generative Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11905/) (2020)
- [On Uncertainty, Tempering, and Data Augmentation in Bayesian Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16481/) (2022)
- [MM-SHAP: A Performance-agnostic Metric for Measuring Multimodal Contributions in Vision and Language Models & Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08158/) (2022)
- [A Perspective on Explainable Artificial Intelligence Methods: SHAP and LIME](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02012/) (2023)
- [A review of uncertainty quantification in medical image analysis: probabilistic and non-probabilistic methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06873/) (2023)
- [Explaining a Series of Models by Propagating Shapley Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00108/) (2021)
- [Explaining Predictive Uncertainty with Information Theoretic Shapley Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05724/) (2023)
- [Data Valuation for Medical Imaging Using Shapley Value: Application on A Large-scale Chest X-ray Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08006/) (2020)
- [Navigating Neural Space: Revisiting Concept Activation Vectors to Overcome Directional Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03482/) (2022)
- [Counterfactual Explanations for Medical Image Classification and Regression using Diffusion Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01571/) (2024)
- [Scalable Importance Tempering and Bayesian Variable Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00541/) (2018)
- [A Nested Model for AI Design and Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16888/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Propagation in XAI: A Comparison of Analytical and Empirical Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03736/) (2025)
- [Here Comes the Explanation: A Shapley Perspective on Multi-contrast Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04645/) (2025)
- [Aleatoric Uncertainty Medical Image Segmentation Estimation via Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22418/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in deep learning have led to its widespread adoption across diverse domains, including medical imaging. This progress is driven by increasingly sophisticated model architectures, such as ResNets, Vision Transformers, and Hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks, that offer enhanced performance at the cost of greater complexity. This complexity often compromises model explainability and interpretability. SHAP has emerged as a prominent method for providing interpretable visualizations that aid domain experts in understanding model predictions. However, SHAP explanations can be unstable and unreliable in the presence of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. In this study, we address this challenge by using Dirichlet posterior sampling and Dempster-Shafer theory to quantify the uncertainty that arises from these unstable explanations in medical imaging applications. The framework uses a belief, plausible, and fusion map approach alongside statistical quantitative analysis to produce quantification of uncertainty in SHAP. Furthermore, we evaluated our framework on three medical imaging datasets with varying class distributions, image qualities, and modality types which introduces noise due to varying image resolutions and modality-specific aspect covering the examples from pathology, ophthalmology, and radiology, introducing significant epistemic uncertainty.