Mask-Induced Displacement in Audio XAI via Logit Trajectory Decomposition
Perturbation-based XAI methods for audio classifiers often estimate feature importance by masking spectrogram regions and crediting output changes to the retained signal. Yet they typically assume the fill (the mask replacement) is negligible. We propose logit-space trajectory decomposition to examine this assumption. An on-axis component captures output along a line connecting the fully filled (occluded) spectrogram to the fully retained original; an off-axis component captures perpendicular displacement. We evaluate across three fills, three audio classifiers, and 1,100 AudioSet clips. We demonstrate that no fill is acoustically neutral under full occlusion: Zero fill activates silence ...
| Authors | Nico García-Peguinho, David Kelly, Fabrizio Smeraldi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 27 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
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