English

ProDG: Prototypes for Data-Free Generative Post-Hoc Explainability

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-21 v2

Abstract

Ante-hoc interpretability methods based on prototypes provide highly accurate explanations by utilizing the intuitive "this looks like that" reasoning paradigm. On the other hand, post-hoc models can explain predictions for a single image without relying on an underlying dataset or requiring costly neural network retraining. Recent approaches successfully solve the retraining problem for prototype-based networks. However, they still face a fundamental limitation: they require access to a subset of data (e.g., a test or validation set) to search for and extract the visual prototypes. In this paper, we address this issue and introduce ProDG: Generative Prototypes for Data-Free Post-Hoc Explainability, a novel framework that leverages generative models to synthesize pure, high-fidelity prototypes directly from the frozen model's weights, completely eliminating the dependency on any external data. By establishing this new frontier in Data-Free XAI, ProDG unlocks robust visual interpretability for privacy-sensitive domains, where original data is strictly restricted or fundamentally inaccessible. Project page: https://github.com/piotr310100/ProDG

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.08858,
  title  = {ProDG: Prototypes for Data-Free Generative Post-Hoc Explainability},
  author = {Piotr Borycki and Magdalena Trędowicz and Jacek Tabor and Łukasz Struski and Przemysław Spurek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08858},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:59:48.751Z