Papers › Towards Best Practice in Explaining Neural Network Decisions with LRP

Towards Best Practice in Explaining Neural Network Decisions with LRP

22 Oct 2019arXiv:1910.09840archive 2025-07-28

Maximilian Kohlbrenner, Alexander Bauer, Shinichi Nakajima, Alexander Binder, Wojciech Samek, Sebastian Lapuschkin

Within the last decade, neural network based predictors have demonstrated impressive - and at times super-human - capabilities. This performance is often paid for with an intransparent prediction process and thus has sparked numerous contributions in the novel field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we focus on a popular and widely used method of XAI, the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). Since its initial proposition LRP has evolved as a method, and a best practice for applying the method has tacitly emerged, based however on humanly observed evidence alone. In this paper we investigate - and for the first time quantify - the effect of this current best practice on feedforward neural networks in a visual object detection setting. The results verify that the layer-dependent approach to LRP applied in recent literature better represents the model's reasoning, and at the same time increases the object localization and class discriminativity of LRP.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

sebastian-lapuschkin/lrp_toolbox mentioned on GitHubtfNOASSERTION report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Explainable artificial intelligenceObject DetectionObject Localizationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Object Detection PASCAL VOC 2012 LRPCMP:a2+ MAP 42.1 #6 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection PASCAL VOC 2012 LRPCMP:a1+ MAP 34.66 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection SIXray LRPz 1 in 10 R@5 0.01347 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections