Inpainting Insights: Elevating Visual XAI with Photorealistic Perturbations

Abstract: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.

Preprint accepted at XAIE4 (ICPR 2026). 15 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. Code available at: this https URL and this https URL

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2607.15482 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2607.15482v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15482 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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