English

Attention, Please! PixelSHAP Reveals What Vision-Language Models Actually Focus On

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-03-11 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Interpretability in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is crucial for trust, debugging, and decision-making in high-stakes applications. We introduce PixelSHAP, a model-agnostic framework extending Shapley-based analysis to structured visual entities. Unlike previous methods focusing on text prompts, PixelSHAP applies to vision-based reasoning by systematically perturbing image objects and quantifying their influence on a VLM's response. PixelSHAP requires no model internals, operating solely on input-output pairs, making it compatible with open-source and commercial models. It supports diverse embedding-based similarity metrics and scales efficiently using optimization techniques inspired by Shapley-based methods. We validate PixelSHAP in autonomous driving, highlighting its ability to enhance interpretability. Key challenges include segmentation sensitivity and object occlusion. Our open-source implementation facilitates further research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.06670,
  title  = {Attention, Please! PixelSHAP Reveals What Vision-Language Models Actually Focus On},
  author = {Roni Goldshmidt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06670},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:12:58.992Z