Policy Gradient-Based Saliency Explanation Method for Black-Box Models
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School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Clc Number:

TP391

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National Key Research and Development Project 2022YFB2703100National Key Research and Development Project (No.2022YFB2703100).

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    Abstract:

    As a core enabling technology for trustworthy artificial intelligence, research on the interpretability of machine learning models plays a vital role in automated decision-making systems. Among them, saliency-based explanations, which intuitively reveal the basis of model decisions in the form of heatmaps, have become a key research direction in explainable artificial intelligence. However, existing approaches suffer from fundamental limitations: Perturbation-based methods are constrained by manually designed distributional assumptions, making it difficult to balance computational efficiency and generalization ability; gradient-based methods require prior knowledge of the model’s internal structure and thus fail to explain black-box models; and linear-approximation-based methods introduce model bias due to excessive local simplification. To address these limitations, we propose Polixplain, a policy-gradient-based saliency explanation method for black-box models. By using the Deletion Score as the core reward signal and incorporating a differentiable relaxation technique into the policy gradient optimization process, Polixplain enables end-to-end optimization toward the faithfulness objective. Image classification tasks are adopted as the experimental testbed, where the high-dimensional feature space and intuitive visual representation provide an ideal environment for multidimensional evaluation of explanation methods. Polixplain outperforms a range of existing explanation methods in terms of both explanation faithfulness and the human interpretability of the generated heatmaps.

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GUO Yuhan, DING Lizhong, WEI Qiuning. Policy Gradient-Based Saliency Explanation Method for Black-Box Models[J]. Journal of Data Acquisition and Processing,2026,41(5):1366-1377.

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History
  • Received:June 12,2025
  • Revised:August 25,2025
  • Adopted:
  • Online: October 14,2026
  • Published:
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