Explainable Saliency: Articulating Reasoning with Contextual Prioritization

Nuo Chen, Ming Jiang, Qi Zhao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025, pp. 9601-9610

Deep saliency models, which predict what parts of an image capture our attention, are often like black boxes. This limits their use, especially in areas where understanding why a model makes a decision is crucial. Our research tackles this challenge by developing an explainable saliency (XSal) model that not only identifies what is important in an image, but also explains its choices in a way that makes sense to humans. We achieve this by using vision-language models to reason about images and by focusing the model's attention on the most crucial information using a contextual prioritization mechanism. Unlike prior approaches that rely on fixation descriptions or soft-attention based semantic aggregation, our method directly models the reasoning steps involved in saliency prediction, generating selectively prioritized explanations clarify why specific regions are prioritized. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in generating high-quality saliency maps and coherent, contextually relevant explanations. This research is a step towards more transparent and trustworthy AI systems that can help us understand and navigate the world around us.