# Explanation Strategies for Image Classification in Humans vs. Current Explainable AI Source: [Explanation Strategies for Image Classification in Humans vs. Current Explainable AI]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:12:38.410Z Authors: Ruoxi Qi, Yueyuan Zheng, Yi Yang, Caleb Chen Cao, Janet H. Hsiao Published: 2023-04-10T08:28:13.000Z ## Abstract Explainable AI (XAI) methods provide explanations of AI models, but our understanding of how they compare with human explanations remains limited. In image classification, we found that humans adopted more explorative attention strategies for explanation than the classification task itself. Two representative explanation strategies were identified through clustering: One involved focused visual scanning on foreground objects with more conceptual explanations diagnostic for inferring class labels, whereas the other involved explorative scanning with more visual explanations rated higher for effectiveness. Interestingly, XAI saliency-map explanations had the highest similarity to the explorative attention strategy in humans, and explanations highlighting discriminative features from invoking observable causality through perturbation had higher similarity to human strategies than those highlighting internal features associated with higher class score. Thus, humans differ in information and strategy use for explanations, and XAI methods that highlight features informing observable causality match better with human explanations, potentially more accessible to users. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()