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Seeing What Shouldn't Be There: Counterfactual GANs for Medical Image Attribution

Summary

A counterfactual explanation method based on GANs with cyclical-consistent loss is proposed for class-oriented feature attribution in medical images. Evaluated on synthetic, tuberculosis, and BraTS datasets, it overcomes limitations of discriminative models. The study also introduces a method to generate plausible counterfactual instances and evaluate their quality.

SourcearXiv Computer VisionAuthor: Shakeeb Murtaza
Seeing What Shouldn't Be There: Counterfactual GANs for Medical Image Attribution
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[2605.05283] Seeing What Shouldn't Be There: Counterfactual GANs for Medical Image Attribution

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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2605.05283 (cs)

[Submitted on 6 May 2026]

Title:Seeing What Shouldn't Be There: Counterfactual GANs for Medical Image Attribution

Authors:Shakeeb Murtaza

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Abstract:Ascription of an image gives insights into the objects that influence the classification of the whole image or its pixels towards a specific category. These insights help radiologists to visualize deformities in medical imaging. Most of the existing visualization techniques are based on discriminative models and highlight regions of the input image participating in the decision-making of a classifier. However, these approaches do not take all noticeable objects into account as their objective is to classify the input by using a minimal set of discriminative features. To overcome the issue, a counterfactual explanation (CX) based class-oriented feature attribution method is proposed. A counterfactual explanation (CX) explicates a causal reasoning process of the form: "if X had not happened, then Y would not have happened". The method is built on generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a cyclical-consistent loss function. We evaluate our method on three datasets: synthetic, tuberculosis and BraTS. All experiments confirm the efficacy of the proposed method. This study also highlighted the limitations of existing counterfactual explanation techniques in producing plausible counterfactual instances (CIs). Accompanying CXs with believable CIs thus provides self-explanatory analogy-based explanations. To this end, a CI generation method is proposed. Also, a novel technique is used to evaluate the quality of CI. The baseline results are produced on the BraTS dataset.

Subjects:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.05283 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2605.05283v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.05283

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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From: Shakeeb Murtaza [view email] [v1] Wed, 6 May 2026 17:30:49 UTC (6,113 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • Existing discriminative models use minimal features, ignoring salient objects.
  • Counterfactual explanations provide causal reasoning for classifier decisions.
  • Method validated on multiple datasets; CI generation and evaluation techniques proposed.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.