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Anthony Deschênes

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Publications

Toward Faithful Explanations in Acoustic Anomaly Detection
Maab Elrashid
Anthony Deschênes
Cem Subakan
Mirco Ravanelli
Rémi Georges
Michael Morin
Interpretability is essential for user trust in real-world anomaly detection applications. However, deep learning models, despite their stro… (see more)ng performance, often lack transparency. In this work, we study the interpretability of autoencoder-based models for audio anomaly detection, by comparing a standard autoencoder (AE) with a mask autoencoder (MAE) in terms of detection performance and interpretability. We applied several attribution methods, including error maps, saliency maps, SmoothGrad, Integrated Gradients, GradSHAP, and Grad-CAM. Although MAE shows a slightly lower detection, it consistently provides more faithful and temporally precise explanations, suggesting a better alignment with true anomalies. To assess the relevance of the regions highlighted by the explanation method, we propose a perturbation-based faithfulness metric that replaces them with their reconstructions to simulate normal input. Our findings, based on experiments in a real industrial scenario, highlight the importance of incorporating interpretability into anomaly detection pipelines and show that masked training improves explanation quality without compromising performance.
2025-12-31
arXiv (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org