# qZACH-ViT: Quantization-Aware Intrinsic Explanations with Recursive Attribution-Stabilized Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15421 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15421/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04612/) (2020)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13630/) (2021)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Interpretability with Self-Explaining Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07538/) (2018)
- [A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10758/) (2018)
- [Conflict-Averse Gradient Descent for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14048/) (2021)
- [Interpretation of Neural Networks is Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10547/) (2017)
- [The (Un)reliability of saliency methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00867/) (2017)
- [On the (In)fidelity and Sensitivity for Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09392/) (2019)
- [Explanations can be manipulated and geometry is to blame](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07983/) (2019)
- [PTQ4ViT: Post-training quantization for vision transformers with twin uniform quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12293/) (2021)
- [Quantus: An Explainable AI Toolkit for Responsible Evaluation of Neural Network Explanations and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06861/) (2022)
- [Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05874/) (2020)
- [FQ-ViT: Post-Training Quantization for Fully Quantized Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13824/) (2021)
- [RepQ-ViT: Scale Reparameterization for Post-Training Quantization of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08254/) (2022)
- [Q-ViT: Accurate and Fully Quantized Low-bit Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06707/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compact medical-image classifiers need efficiency and interpretable evidence, yet these goals are often addressed separately. We introduce qZACH-ViT, a quantization-aware extension of the zero-token (CLS-token-free), position-free ZACH-ViT backbone with recursive intrinsic patch-level class evidence. We also introduce Recursive Attribution-Stabilized Optimization (RASO), which norm-matches classification and attribution gradients and removes attribution components that conflict with classification. We evaluate four controlled conditions on seven MedMNIST datasets using 50 training images per class and ten fixed seeds, completing 280 runs. All 210 qZACH-ViT checkpoints are converted to executable mixed-precision ONNX INT8 graphs containing 16 signed INT8 MatMulInteger projections with INT32 accumulation. Deployed mixed-precision INT8 qZACH-ViT with Adam improves the FP32 ZACH-ViT baseline mean on all seven datasets, with a mean paired gain of 0.0313 in the dataset-specific primary metric; qZACH-ViT with RASO yields a mean gain of 0.0368. Across 964,920 source-to-INT8 test comparisons, prediction agreement is 99.9751%, with a mean absolute primary-metric change of 0.000133 and a maximum of 0.004386. Across 3,600 matched intrinsic maps, mean cosine similarity is 0.999955, mean rank correlation is 0.9944, and mean top-10% overlap is 0.9692. ONNX artifacts are 70.0% smaller than source checkpoints and provide 1.41× and 2.39× end-to-end CPU speedups with one and four threads. RASO significantly reduces sufficiency error and improves input-noise stability over Adam with the same attribution loss, but does not dominate every predictive or explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) metric. These results establish qZACH-ViT as a deployable compact intrinsically explainable model and RASO as a targeted stability-oriented optimization procedure.