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arXiv · 2509.23051

Activation Matching for Explanation Generation

Pirzada Suhail·Aditya Anand·Amit Sethi
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Abstract

In this paper we introduce an activation-matching--based approach to generate minimal, faithful explanations for the decision-making of a pretrained classifier on any given image. Given an input image $x$ and a frozen model $f$, we train a lightweight autoencoder to output a binary mask $m$ such that the explanation $e = m \odot x$ preserves both the model's prediction and the intermediate activations of \(x\). Our objective combines: (i) multi-layer activation matching with KL divergence to align distributions and cross-entropy to retain the top-1 label for both the image and the explanation; (ii) mask priors -- L1 area for minimality, a binarization penalty for crisp 0/1 masks, and total variation for compactness; and (iii) abductive constraints for faithfulness and necessity. Together, these objectives yield small, human-interpretable masks that retain classifier behavior while discarding irrelevant input regions, providing practical and faithful minimalist explanations for the decision making of the underlying model.

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Pirzada Suhail, Aditya Anand, Amit Sethi. 2025-09-27. Activation Matching for Explanation Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23051

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