AA-SHAP: Superpixel Affinity for Explainable Image Classification

Vahidin Hasić

doi:10.1111/exsy.70376

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AA-SHAP: Superpixel Affinity for Explainable Image Classification

2026-09-30

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Vahidin Hasić *

Amar Halilovic

Senka Krivić

DOI：10.1111/exsy.70376

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Abstract

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Explainable AI (XAI) is essential for building trust in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) is a well-known XAI technique for attributing feature importance, but it struggles with exponential computational complexity as the number of features increases. Various approximation methods have been suggested, but they compromise SHAP's theoretical principles. We introduce AA-SHAP, a novel approach that derives superpixel affinity from the explained model's internals to identify and group superpixels. AA-SHAP constructs a relevance-consistency affinity between superpixel interdependence, enabling much faster SHAP calculations on a reduced set of meta-superpixels while outperforming previous methods in explanation faithfulness. Exact Shapley values are computed on the reduced meta-superpixel game, preserving all axiomatic guarantees within the aggregated feature space. Evaluated across multiple datasets, both convolutional and transformer classification architectures show that AA-SHAP produces more faithful attributions than competing methods while improving computational speed and maintaining SHAP's theoretical axioms. The source code is available at https://github.com/vhasic/AA-SHAP.

Keywords:

deep neural networks

explainability

explainable AI

image classification

interpretability

SHAP

XAI