通过解耦特征提升模型解释性,让热力图更聚焦、更准确。
SaliencyDecor: Enhancing Neural Network Interpretability through Feature Decorrelation

- 在训练中强制特征正交,减少梯度扩散干扰
- 热力图更清晰锐利,目标区域定位更准
- 无需改模型或增加推理开销,适合所有梯度类解释方法
基于梯度的可解释性方法广泛用于解读深度神经网络,但常产生噪声大、不稳定的解释,与语义上有意义的输入特征对齐不佳。我们发现根本原因在于学习表征的几何结构:相关特征维度会将归因梯度分散到冗余方向,导致热力图模糊且不可靠。为此,我们识别出特征相关性是梯度可解释性的结构性限制,并提出 SaliencyDecor——一种无需修改解释方法或模型架构的训练框架,通过将特征空间重塑为正交,促进梯度集中流动,提升归因保真度。SaliencyDecor 联合优化分类任务、特征遮蔽下的预测一致性及一个解耦正则项,无需架构变更或推理时开销。在多个基准和架构上的实验表明,该方法生成的热力图显著更锐利、更聚焦于物体,同时提升预测性能,在各数据集上均实现准确率提升。结果确立了该方法作为提升可解释性与准确性的原理性机制,挑战了解释质量与模型性能之间的传统权衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Gradient-based saliency methods are widely used to interpret deep neural networks, yet they often produce noisy and unstable explanations that poorly align with semantically meaningful input features. We argue that a fundamental cause of this behavior lies in the geometry of learned representations: correlated feature dimensions diffuse attribution gradients across redundant directions, resulting in blurred and unreliable saliency maps. To address this issue, we identify feature correlation as a structural limitation of gradient-based interpretability and propose SaliencyDecor, a training framework that enforces feature decorrelation to improve attribution fidelity without modifying saliency methods or model architectures by reshaping the feature space toward orthogonality, our approach promotes more concentrated gradient flow and improves the fidelity of saliency-based explanations. SaliencyDecor jointly optimizes classification, prediction consistency under feature masking, and a decorrelation regularizer, requiring no architectural changes or inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and architectures demonstrate that our method produces substantially sharper and more object-focused saliency maps while simultaneously improving predictive performance, achieving accuracy gains across the datasets. These results establish our method as a principled mechanism for enhancing both interpretability and accuracy, challenging the conventional trade-off between explanation quality and model performance.
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