Hi Joseph! I’ll briefly address the saliency map concern here – it likely originates from this paper, which showed that some types of saliency mapping methods had no more explanatory power than edge detectors. It’s a great paper, and worth a read. The key thing to note is that this was only true of some gradient-based saliency mapping methods, which are, of course, model-specific. Gradients can be deceptive! Model agnostic, perturbation-based saliency mapping doesn’t suffer from the same kind of problems – see p.12 here.
Hi Joseph! I’ll briefly address the saliency map concern here – it likely originates from this paper, which showed that some types of saliency mapping methods had no more explanatory power than edge detectors. It’s a great paper, and worth a read. The key thing to note is that this was only true of some gradient-based saliency mapping methods, which are, of course, model-specific. Gradients can be deceptive! Model agnostic, perturbation-based saliency mapping doesn’t suffer from the same kind of problems – see p.12 here.