Det-LIME: Detector-Aware, Multi-Instance Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations for Automated Marine Mammal Detection

Abstract:Despite the rapid uptake of black-box object detectors in marine mammal research and monitoring, explainability techniques are rarely integrated into conservation workflows. Furthermore, most classification-oriented explainability tools are ill-suited to detection tasks involving imagery of social organisms or those with colonial life histories, as they ignore multiple detections within a scene and produce single-instance outputs that blur evidence across individuals. These methods also generate low-resolution, often biologically irrelevant visuals, limiting their utility for debugging, targeted data augmentation, and refined data collection. We proposed Det-LIME, a detector-aware, multi-instance adaptation of Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) that produced instance-specific, box-aligned explanations by combining per-detection weighting, a proximity kernel that emphasizes regions near each box, and Intersection-over-Union-based matching to track the same instance across perturbations. We evaluated Det-LIME on aerial drone imagery for harbor seal detection, with an additional seabird case study to assess generality, and compared it with vanilla LIME, Stabilized LIME, Deterministic LIME, and gradient-based attribution methods. Using the Attribution Ratio and Max Saliency Hit Rate metrics, we showed that Det-LIME consistently improved multi-instance attribution. In practice, these higher-resolution, instance-aware explanations provide insight into model outputs and support post-processing, debugging, and actionable improvements in modeling and data collection or augmentation.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.17479 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.17479v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17479 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.70276 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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