On the Evaluation Consistency of Attribution-based Explanations

Jiarui Duan, Haoling Li, Haofei Zhang, Hao Jiang, Mengqi Xue, Li Sun, Mingli Song, Jie Song* ;

"Attribution-based explanations are garnering increasing attention recently and have emerged as the predominant approach towards eXplanable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). However, the absence of consistent configurations and systematic investigations in prior literature impedes comprehensive evaluations of existing methodologies. In this work, we introduce Meta-Rank, an open platform for benchmarking attribution methods in the image domain. Presently, Meta-Rank assesses eight exemplary attribution methods using six renowned model architectures on four diverse datasets, employing both the Most Relevant First (MoRF) and Least Relevant First (LeRF) evaluation protocols. Through extensive experimentation, our benchmark reveals three insights in attribution evaluation endeavors: 1) evaluating attribution methods under disparate settings can yield divergent performance rankings; 2) although inconsistent across numerous cases, the performance rankings exhibit remarkable consistency across distinct checkpoints along the same training trajectory; 3) prior attempts at consistent evaluation fare no better than baselines when extended to more heterogeneous models and datasets. Our findings underscore the necessity for future research in this domain to conduct rigorous evaluations encompassing a broader range of models and datasets, and to reassess the assumptions underlying the empirical success of different attribution methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ TreeThree-R/Meta-Rank."