Evaluating Feature Attribution Methods in the Image Domain

Feature attribution maps are a popular approach to highlight the most important pixels in an image for a given prediction of a model. Despite a recent growth in popularity and available methods, little attention is given to the objective evaluation of such attribution maps. Building on previous work in this domain, we investigate existing metrics and propose new variants of metrics for the evaluation of attribution maps. We confirm a recent finding that different attribution metrics seem to measure different underlying concepts of attribution maps, and extend this finding to a larger selection of attribution metrics. We also find that metric results on one dataset do not necessarily generalize to other datasets, and methods with desirable theoretical properties such as DeepSHAP do not necessarily outperform computationally cheaper alternatives. Based on these findings, we propose a general benchmarking approach to identify the ideal feature attribution method for a given use case. Implementations of attribution metrics and our experiments are available online.
Comment: Updated based on reviewer comments: added discussion on sanity checks, application to tabular datasets, and minor changes