DiffGradCAM: A Class Activation Map Using the Full Model Decision to Solve Unaddressed Adversarial Attacks

Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and its gradient-based variants (e.g., GradCAM) have become standard tools for explaining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) predictions. However, these approaches typically focus on individual logits, while for neural networks using softmax, the class membership probability estimates depend only on the differences between logits, not on their absolute values. This disconnect leaves standard CAMs vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, such as passive fooling, where a model is trained to produce misleading CAMs without affecting decision performance. To address this vulnerability, we propose DiffGradCAM and its higher-order derivative version DiffGradCAM++, as novel, lightweight, contrastive approaches to class activation mapping that are not susceptible to passive fooling and match the output of standard methods such as GradCAM and GradCAM++ in the non-adversarial case. To test our claims, we introduce Salience-Hoax Activation Maps (SHAMs), a more advanced, entropy-aware form of passive fooling that serves as a benchmark for CAM robustness under adversarial conditions. Together, SHAM and DiffGradCAM establish a new framework for probing and improving the robustness of saliency-based explanations. We validate both contributions across multi-class tasks with few and many classes.