A Survey of Post-Hoc XAI Methods From a Visualization Perspective: Challenges and Opportunities

XAI (eXplainable AI) has become a pivotal area of research with the advancement of deep learning (DL) technologies and applications. Post-hoc explanation methods interpret deep learning predictions by uncovering the significance of input features, while visualization tools can contribute to a deep understanding of AI model reasoning based on these methods. In this paper, we survey a broad spectrum of post-hoc explanation methods and the visual analytics work based on them. First, we categorize the computational methods into four main types: perturbation-based, gradient-based, decomposition-based, and concept-based. While the first three focus on attributing the model’s output to specific regions of the input image, concept-based methods provide global explanations by mapping human-understandable concepts to high-level features. Then, we examine the methodologies, features, strengths, and limitations of each approach. Moreover, we review existing visualization-focused work based on these computational methods. Finally, we discuss further research challenges and opportunities for XAI visualization with post-hoc explanation.