Now you see me! A framework for obtaining class-relevant saliency maps

Neural networks are part of daily-life decision-making, including in high-stakes settings where understanding and transparency are key. Saliency maps have been developed to gain understanding into which input features neural networks use for a specific prediction. Although widely employed, these methods often result in overly general saliency maps that fail to identify the specific information that triggered the classification. In this work, we suggest a framework that allows to incorporate attributions across classes to arrive at saliency maps that actually capture the class-relevant information. On established benchmarks for attribution methods, including the grid-pointing game and randomization-based sanity checks, we show that our framework heavily boosts the performance of standard saliency map approaches. It is, by design, agnostic to model architectures and attribution methods and now allows to identify the distinguishing and shared features used for a model prediction.

@article{walter2025_2503.07346,
  title={ Now you see me! A framework for obtaining class-relevant saliency maps },
  author={ Nils Philipp Walter and Jilles Vreeken and Jonas Fischer },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07346},
  year={ 2025 }
}