Transferring Visual Explainability of Self-Explaining Models through Task Arithmetic

Abstract: In scenarios requiring both prediction and explanation efficiency for image classification, self-explaining models that perform both tasks in a single inference are effective. However, their training incurs substantial labeling and computational costs. This study aims to tackle the issue by proposing a method to transfer the visual explainability of self-explaining models, learned in a source domain, to a target domain based on a task arithmetic framework. Specifically, we construct a self-explaining model by extending image classifiers based on a vision-language pretrained model. We then define an \emph{explainability vector} as the difference between model parameters trained on the source domain with and without explanation supervision. Based on the task arithmetic framework, we impart explainability to a model trained only on the prediction task in the target domain by applying the explainability vector. Experimental results on various image classification datasets demonstrate that, except for transfers between some less-related domains, visual explainability can be successfully transferred from source to target domains, improving explanation quality in the target domain without sacrificing classification accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the explainability vector learned on a large and diverse dataset like ImageNet, extended with explanation supervision, exhibits universality and robustness, improving explanation quality on nine out of ten different target datasets. We also find that the explanation quality achieved with a single model inference is comparable to that of Kernel SHAP, which requires 150 model inferences.