# Inpainting Insights: Elevating Visual XAI with Photorealistic Perturbations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15482/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15421/) (2022)
- [Unmasking Clever Hans Predictors and Assessing What Machines Really Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10178/) (2019)
- [Real Time Image Saliency for Black Box Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07857/) (2017)
- [An Analysis of LIME for Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12487/) (2020)
- [What does LIME really see in images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06307/) (2021)
- [RAD: Region-Aware Diffusion Models for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09191/) (2024)
- [Transformer-based Image and Video Inpainting: Current Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00226/) (2024)
- [Photorealistic Inpainting for Perturbation-based Explanations in Ecological Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03317/) (2025)
- [How to scale hyperparameters for quickshift image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09286/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing complexity of state-of-the-art machine learning models has made their behavior progressively harder to interpret, spurring rapid advancements in the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Among many methods proposed, perturbation-based approaches play a major role. By systematically altering (perturbing) input features, these approaches measure the impact on the model's predictions. For image data, traditional perturbation techniques, often involve replacing pixel values e.g., with a pre-defined color. However, such approaches, but also more refined deterministic techniques, generate unrealistic out-of-distribution samples and often leave visible artifacts, which can mislead the model and compromise explanation quality. In this work, we adjust LIME, a widely used perturbation-based method, to demonstrate how generative inpainting can improve perturbation-based explanations for images. We achieve photorealistic perturbed samples that align better with the original data distribution and enhance explanation quality.