Inpainting Insights: Elevating Visual XAI with Photorealistic Perturbations

Josef Lindl; Mariana Chaves; Damien Garreau

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arXiv · 2607.15482

Inpainting Insights: Elevating Visual XAI with Photorealistic Perturbations

Josef Lindl·Mariana Chaves·Damien Garreau

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Abstract

The increasing complexity of state-of-the-art machine learning models has made their behavior progressively harder to interpret, spurring rapid advancements in the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Among many methods proposed, perturbation-based approaches play a major role. By systematically altering (perturbing) input features, these approaches measure the impact on the model's predictions. For image data, traditional perturbation techniques, often involve replacing pixel values e.g., with a pre-defined color. However, such approaches, but also more refined deterministic techniques, generate unrealistic out-of-distribution samples and often leave visible artifacts, which can mislead the model and compromise explanation quality. In this work, we adjust LIME, a widely used perturbation-based method, to demonstrate how generative inpainting can improve perturbation-based explanations for images. We achieve photorealistic perturbed samples that align better with the original data distribution and enhance explanation quality.

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Josef Lindl, Mariana Chaves, Damien Garreau. 2026-07-16. Inpainting Insights: Elevating Visual XAI with Photorealistic Perturbations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15482

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