arXiv AI By Jo\"el Roman Ky, Salah Ghamizi, Maxime Cordy

Measuring Cross-Modal Synergy: A Benchmark for VLM Explainability

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The paper introduces Synergistic Faithfulness (𝔽_syn), a new metric based on the Shapley Interaction Index that isolates the joint contribution of visual and textual modalities in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs). It demonstrates that existing explainers overemphasize visual salience and fail to capture true cross‑modal synergy, and provides a scalable evaluation framework for auditing VLM reasoning. The authors evaluate nine XAI methods across three VLM architectures and datasets, revealing significant shortcomings in current approaches.

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