arXiv AI
Sep 2

HiLRP: Toward One Trustworthy Explanation for Vision Transformer: Conservation-Valid Attribution via Attention Primitives

HiLRP introduces a unified attribution framework for Vision Transformers (ViTs) that addresses the challenges posed by diverse architectural designs. By decomposing ViT operations into four basic types—linear maps, bilinear mixing, normalization/gating, and reindexing—HiLRP applies conservation‑satisfying relevance rules, enabling reliable explanations across a wide range of backbones. The method outperforms 14 existing attribution techniques on 10 architectures, maintaining conservation and improving localization accuracy (0.97 Pointing) compared to competitors.

By Sathiyamohan Nishankar, Pubudu Sanjeewani, Asanka Perera, Selvarajah Thuseethan