Safety, alignment & interpretability· 2018
Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps
On the reading lists
- #130 in the Top 500 (2026 edition)
- #14 in Safety, alignment & interpretability (2026 edition)
Why it matters
Demonstrated that popular saliency methods can ignore model parameters, reshaping attribution evaluation.
Condensed from the expert lists' notes.
The record
- First released
- 2018 (from arXiv 1810.03292)
- Citations
- 2,947 citations, as counted by
Semantic Scholar (non-commercial licence) - Named by
- both expert lists
- Score
- 0.620 · computed rank 130 · consensus 0.89, must-read 1, citations percentile 0.723 (2010s · safety), awards 0, existing lists 0. Method
Editor's notes
- Readability check: pass: A short, sobering test of explanation methods. (AI draft (Claude), not yet reviewed, 2026-10-29)
Data sources
Catalogue data from OpenAlex (CC0), Crossref (CC0 metadata; no abstracts are shown), arXiv, and Papers With Code (CC BY-SA 4.0), and
Semantic Scholar (used under its non-commercial API licence). Each count names its source. See the method.