Attention Lattice Adapter: Visual Explanation Generation for Visual Foundation Model

In this study, we consider the problem of generating visual explanations in visual foundation models. Numerous methods have been proposed for this purpose; however, they often cannot be applied to complex models due to their lack of adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel explanation generation method in visual foundation models that is aimed at both generating explanations and partially updating model parameters to enhance interpretability. Our approach introduces two novel mechanisms: Attention Lattice Adapter (ALA) and Alternating Epoch Architect (AEA). ALA mechanism simplifies the process by eliminating the need for manual layer selection, thus enhancing the model's adaptability and interpretability. Moreover, the AEA mechanism, which updates ALA's parameters every other epoch, effectively addresses the common issue of overly small attention regions. We evaluated our method on two benchmark datasets, CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-S. Our results showed that our method outperformed the baseline methods in terms of mean intersection over union (IoU), insertion score, deletion score, and insertion-deletion score on both the CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-S datasets. Notably, our best model achieved a 53.2-point improvement in mean IoU on the CUB-200-2011 dataset compared with the baselines.

Shinnosuke Hirano, Yuiga Wada, Tsumugi Iida, Komei Sugiura · 2025