Diffusion Integrated Gradients: Controllable Path Generation for Flexible Feature Attribution
The authors propose Diffusion Integrated Gradients (DiffIG), a novel method that reformulates path generation as a conditional generative modeling problem to address limitations in existing attribution techniques. While integrated gradients are widely used, their reliance on fixed or hand-crafted paths often results in noisy or distorted attributions. To solve this, DiffIG trains a diffusion model to learn a distribution over paths derived from a Stick-Breaking Process. The method then employs guided sampling to allow for the embedding of user guidance during the inference-time sampling procedure. This approach enables flexible and controllable feature attribution by treating path selection as a generative task rather than a static choice. Experimental results demonstrate that DiffIG quantitatively matches or outperforms existing path-based methods in terms of attribution quality. Furthermore, the generated explanations are shown to be perceptually aligned with human expectations. The work introduces a new generative perspective for Explainable Artificial Intelligence that supports dynamic control over explanation paths.