# Does Explanation Correctness Matter? Linking Computational XAI Evaluation to Human Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25251/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Interpretable Explanations of Black Boxes by Meaningful Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03296/) (2017)
- [A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10758/) (2018)
- [Evaluating the visualization of what a Deep Neural Network has learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06321/) (2015)
- [Does the Whole Exceed its Parts? The Effect of AI Explanations on Complementary Team Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14779/) (2020)
- [The (Un)reliability of saliency methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00867/) (2017)
- [Top-down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00507/) (2016)
- [From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods: A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08164/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Explainable AI: Which Algorithmic Explanations Help Users Predict Model Behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01831/) (2020)
- [Proxy Tasks and Subjective Measures Can Be Misleading in Evaluating Explainable AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08298/) (2020)
- [Ground Truth Evaluation of Neural Network Explanations with CLEVR-XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07258/) (2020)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) 2.0: A Manifesto of Open Challenges and Interdisciplinary Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19775/) (2023)
- [What Do We Want From Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)? -- A Stakeholder Perspective on XAI and a Conceptual Model Guiding Interdisciplinary XAI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07817/) (2021)
- [Explanations Can Reduce Overreliance on AI Systems During Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06823/) (2022)
- [Restricting the Flow: Information Bottlenecks for Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00396/) (2020)
- [HIVE: Evaluating the Human Interpretability of Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03184/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Deep Learning Interpretability in Time Series Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13924/) (2020)
- [What I Cannot Predict, I Do Not Understand: A Human-Centered Evaluation Framework for Explainability Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04417/) (2021)
- [The effectiveness of feature attribution methods and its correlation with automatic evaluation scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14944/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Saliency Map Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks: A User Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00772/) (2020)
- [Towards Human-centered Explainable AI: A Survey of User Studies for Model Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11584/) (2022)
- [Towards a Rigorous Evaluation of XAI Methods on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07082/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Explainable AI (XAI) methods are commonly evaluated using functional correctness metrics, sometimes termed faithfulness or fidelity, which estimate how closely an explanation reflects the model's reasoning. Higher correctness is assumed to produce better human understanding, but this link has not been tested with controlled levels. We conducted a user study (N=200) that manipulated explanation correctness at four levels (100%, 85%, 70%, 55%) in a synthetic time series classification task where participants could not rely on domain knowledge or visual intuition. Correctness was defined against a known ground truth, not estimated from a trained model. Participants predicted a simulated AI's decisions from feature-attribution-style explanations (forward simulation), and we used their forward simulation accuracy as a proxy for understanding. Correctness affected understanding, but not at every level: forward simulation accuracy dropped at 70% and 55% relative to fully correct explanations, with no further reduction below 70% and no conclusive difference between 85% and 100%. Lower correctness reduced how many participants predicted accurately rather than lowering accuracy uniformly, and even fully correct explanations did not guarantee understanding: forward simulation accuracy was bimodal there, with only a subset of participants well above chance. In exploratory analyses, some participants predicted decisions accurately but described the wrong pattern when asked what the AI used, and self-reported ratings correlated with forward simulation accuracy only when explanations were fully correct. These findings show that not all differences in functional correctness translate to differences in human understanding, highlighting the need to validate functional metrics against human outcomes.