2025/10/16 by Simone Carnemolla, Carnemolla, Simone, Matteo Pennisi +13 · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #I.2.m #cs.AI #cs.CV
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.14741
arxiv published 2025/10/16 · arxiv updated 2025/11/16
Understanding and explaining the behavior of machine learning models is essential for building transparent and trustworthy AI systems. We introduce DEXTER, a data-free framework that employs diffusion models and large language models to generate global, textual explanations of visual classifiers. DEXTER operates by optimizing text prompts to synthesize class-conditional images that strongly activate a target classifier. These synthetic samples are then used to elicit detailed natural language reports that describe class-specific decision patterns and biases. Unlike prior work, DEXTER enables natural language explanation about a classifier's decision process without access to training data or ground-truth labels. We demonstrate DEXTER's flexibility across three tasks-activation maximization, slice discovery and debiasing, and bias explanation-each illustrating its ability to uncover the internal mechanisms of visual classifiers. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including a user study, show that DEXTER produces accurate, interpretable outputs. Experiments on ImageNet, Waterbirds, CelebA, and FairFaces confirm that DEXTER outperforms existing approaches in global model explanation and class-level bias reporting. Code is available at https://github.com/perceivelab/dexter.