What Do Deep Saliency Models Learn about Visual Attention?
Shi Chen Ming Jiang Qi Zhao
In recent years, deep saliency models have made significant progress in
predicting human visual attention. However, the mechanisms behind their success
remain largely unexplained due to the opaque nature of deep neural networks. In
this paper, we present a novel analytic framework that sheds light on the
implicit features learned by saliency models and provides principled
interpretation and quantification of their contributions to saliency
prediction. Our approach decomposes these implicit features into interpretable
bases that are explicitly aligned with semantic attributes and reformulates
saliency prediction as a weighted combination of probability maps connecting
the bases and saliency. By applying our framework, we conduct extensive
analyses from various perspectives, including the positive and negative weights
of semantics, the impact of training data and architectural designs, the
progressive influences of fine-tuning, and common failure patterns of
state-of-the-art deep saliency models. Additionally, we demonstrate the
effectiveness of our framework by exploring visual attention characteristics in
various application scenarios, such as the atypical attention of people with
autism spectrum disorder, attention to emotion-eliciting stimuli, and attention
evolution over time. Our code is publicly available at
\url{https://github.com/szzexpoi/saliency_analysis}.