# Pixel-level Certified Explanations via Randomized Smoothing

Source: [Pixel-level Certified Explanations via Randomized Smoothing](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa79801e209131cea7dd6e>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:59:47.353Z

Authors: Alaa Anani, Tobias Lorenz, Mario Fritz, Bernt Schiele

Published: 2025-06-18T14:41:24.000Z

## Abstract

Post-hoc attribution methods aim to explain deep learning predictions by highlighting influential input pixels. However, these explanations are highly non-robust: small, imperceptible input perturbations can drastically alter the attribution map while maintaining the same prediction. This vulnerability undermines their trustworthiness and calls for rigorous robustness guarantees of pixel-level attribution scores. We introduce the first certification framework that guarantees pixel-level robustness for any black-box attribution method using randomized smoothing. By sparsifying and smoothing attribution maps, we reformulate the task as a segmentation problem and certify each pixel's importance against $\\ell\_2$-bounded perturbations. We further propose three evaluation metrics to assess certified robustness, localization, and faithfulness. An extensive evaluation of 12 attribution methods across 5 ImageNet models shows that our certified attributions are robust, interpretable, and faithful, enabling reliable use in downstream tasks. Our code is at https://github.com/AlaaAnani/certified-attributions.

## 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](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15499>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15499.pdf>)
