# Missingness Bias Calibration in Feature Attribution Explanations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04831/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [MedMCQA : A Large-scale Multi-Subject Multi-Choice Dataset for Medical domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14371/) (2022)
- [A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10758/) (2018)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [The (Un)reliability of saliency methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00867/) (2017)
- [From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods: A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08164/) (2022)
- [Explaining Image Classifiers by Counterfactual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08024/) (2018)
- [OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11104/) (2022)
- [A Consistent and Efficient Evaluation Strategy for Attribution Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00449/) (2022)
- [Do Feature Attribution Methods Correctly Attribute Features?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14403/) (2021)
- [Shapley explainability on the data manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01272/) (2020)
- [The Out-of-Distribution Problem in Explainability and Search Methods for Feature Importance Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00786/) (2021)
- [Post-hoc Uncertainty Calibration for Domain Drift Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10988/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Benchmarks for Scientific Research in Explainable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12543/) (2021)
- [Post hoc Explanations may be Ineffective for Detecting Unknown Spurious Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04629/) (2022)
- [FunnyBirds: A Synthetic Vision Dataset for a Part-Based Analysis of Explainable AI Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06248/) (2023)
- [Interpretation of NLP models through input marginalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13984/) (2020)
- [Towards Formal XAI: Formally Approximate Minimal Explanations of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13915/) (2022)
- [Missingness Bias in Model Debugging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08945/) (2022)
- [Calibrated ensembles can mitigate accuracy tradeoffs under distribution shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08977/) (2022)
- [On Baselines for Local Feature Attributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00905/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Faithfulness Without Anchors: A Position Paper on the Structural Misalignments of Explainable AI Faithfulness Metrics for Feature Importance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12493/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Popular explanation methods often produce unreliable feature importance scores due to missingness bias, a systematic distortion that arises when models are probed with ablated, out-of-distribution inputs. Existing solutions treat this as a deep representational flaw that requires expensive retraining or architectural modifications. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that missingness bias can be effectively treated as a superficial artifact of the model's output space. We introduce MCal, a lightweight post-hoc method that corrects this bias by fine-tuning a simple linear head on the outputs of a frozen base model. Surprisingly, we find this simple correction consistently reduces missingness bias and is competitive with, or even outperforms, prior heavyweight approaches across diverse medical benchmarks spanning vision, language, and tabular domains.