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Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization

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arxiv 1610.02391 v4 pith:MFU6MCSS submitted 2016-10-07 cs.CV cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CVcs.AIcs.LG
keywords grad-cammodelscnnsexplanationsimagelocalizationvisualcaptioning
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We propose a technique for producing "visual explanations" for decisions from a large class of CNN-based models, making them more transparent. Our approach - Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses the gradients of any target concept, flowing into the final convolutional layer to produce a coarse localization map highlighting important regions in the image for predicting the concept. Grad-CAM is applicable to a wide variety of CNN model-families: (1) CNNs with fully-connected layers, (2) CNNs used for structured outputs, (3) CNNs used in tasks with multimodal inputs or reinforcement learning, without any architectural changes or re-training. We combine Grad-CAM with fine-grained visualizations to create a high-resolution class-discriminative visualization and apply it to off-the-shelf image classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA) models, including ResNet-based architectures. In the context of image classification models, our visualizations (a) lend insights into their failure modes, (b) are robust to adversarial images, (c) outperform previous methods on localization, (d) are more faithful to the underlying model and (e) help achieve generalization by identifying dataset bias. For captioning and VQA, we show that even non-attention based models can localize inputs. We devise a way to identify important neurons through Grad-CAM and combine it with neuron names to provide textual explanations for model decisions. Finally, we design and conduct human studies to measure if Grad-CAM helps users establish appropriate trust in predictions from models and show that Grad-CAM helps untrained users successfully discern a 'stronger' nodel from a 'weaker' one even when both make identical predictions. Our code is available at https://github.com/ramprs/grad-cam/, along with a demo at http://gradcam.cloudcv.org, and a video at youtu.be/COjUB9Izk6E.

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Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    cs.LG 2026-04 accept novelty 7.0 of 10

    ViTaX certifies targeted semifactual robustness: a minimal feature subset can be perturbed by ε without flipping a neural network from class y to a user-specified high-risk class t.

  2. Simulation-based inference using splitting schemes for partially observed diffusions in chemical reaction networks

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    Chemical Langevin equations are rewritten as perturbed CIR-type SDEs, enabling a structure-preserving splitting scheme and an ABC-SMC algorithm for inference on partially observed reaction networks.

  3. On Spectral Properties of Gradient-based Explanation Methods

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gradient-based explanations behave like frequency-band selectors: the gradient acts as a high-pass filter, perturbation as a low-pass filter, and their combination creates explanations that shift with the perturbation scale.

  4. KIGNet: Physics-Motivated Multi-Graph Representation Learning for Explainable Jet Tagging

    hep-ph 2025-12 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    E-PCN reaches 94.67% macro-accuracy on 10-class jet tagging by weighting graphs with angular separation, transverse momentum, momentum fraction, and invariant mass, with Grad-CAM showing the first two account for 76% ...

  5. Systematic Evaluation of Attribution Methods: Eliminating Threshold Bias and Revealing Method-Dependent Performance Patterns

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    Averaging IoU across many thresholds ranks XRAI above LIME and Integrated Gradients variants on HAM10000, and shows single-threshold attribution rankings are unstable.

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  9. On the Complexity-Faithfulness Trade-off of Gradient-Based Explanations

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  10. Faithful, Interpretable Chest X-ray Diagnosis with Anti-Aliased B-cos Networks

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    Combining B-cos networks with anti-aliasing pooling (FLC or BlurPool) reduces grid artifacts in chest X-ray explanation maps while keeping diagnostic accuracy close to baseline networks.

  11. CASE: Contrastive Activation for Saliency Estimation

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    CASE removes gradient components shared with confused classes to produce more class-distinct saliency maps, validated on a top-k overlap diagnostic where many existing methods show class-insensitive behavior.

  12. XAI-Guided Analysis of Residual Networks for Interpretable Pneumonia Detection in Paediatric Chest X-rays

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    A fine-tuned ResNet-50 with Grad-CAM and Monte Carlo dropout reports 95.94% accuracy and 98.91% AUC for pediatric pneumonia on the Kermany chest X-ray dataset.

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