# VGER: Voxel-Guided Global Event Ranking for Event Cloud Attribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01470/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2026.

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

- [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)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (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)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [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)
- [The (Un)reliability of saliency methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00867/) (2017)
- [Converting Static Image Datasets to Spiking Neuromorphic Datasets Using Saccades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.07629/) (2015)
- [On the Robustness of Interpretability Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08049/) (2018)
- [On the (In)fidelity and Sensitivity for Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09392/) (2019)
- [HATS: Histograms of Averaged Time Surfaces for Robust Event-based Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07913/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Learning of Representations for Asynchronous Event-Based Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08245/) (2019)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01451/) (2019)
- [PointCloud Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01687/) (2018)
- [GET: Group Event Transformer for Event-Based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02642/) (2023)
- [EventNet: Asynchronous Recursive Event Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07045/) (2018)
- [Event Transformer. A sparse-aware solution for efficient event data processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03355/) (2022)
- [Metrics for saliency map evaluation of deep learning explanation methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13291/) (2022)
- [A Voxel Graph CNN for Object Classification with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00216/) (2021)
- [SpikePoint: An Efficient Point-based Spiking Neural Network for Event Cameras Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07189/) (2023)
- [EventPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description for Event-based Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00210/) (2021)
- [A Simple and Effective Point-based Network for Event Camera 6-DOFs Pose Relocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19412/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras produce sparse and asynchronous event streams that provide rich spatio-temporal information for efficient perception. Recent advances in event-based models have demonstrated strong performance by directly modeling asynchronous events without dense frame reconstruction. However, identifying the event-level evidence behind their predictions is crucial for improving model transparency and reliability. Directly adapting point-level saliency methods from point clouds provides fine-grained attribution but overlooks event-specific spatio-temporal structures. To address this limitation, we propose Voxel-Guided Global Event Ranking (VGER), a training-free attribution framework for point-based event cloud networks. VGER combines event-level gradient evidence with task-aware voxel perturbation evidence, transferring regional contribution into event-level attribution scores while preserving fine-grained resolution. Furthermore, VGER introduces a unified event ranking strategy, where high-ranked events are expected to be prediction-critical and low-ranked events are expected to have limited influence on predictions. We evaluate VGER on three event-based benchmarks with PointNet, PointNet++, and EventMamba. Across nine dataset-backbone settings, VGER consistently improves both high-tail and low-tail deletion performance over point-level saliency baselines.