PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

PhaseWin Search Framework Enable Efficient Object-Level Interpretation

Attribution is essential for interpreting object-level foundation models. Recent methods based on submodular subset selection have achieved high faithfulness, but their efficiency limitations hinder practical deployment in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose PhaseWin, a novel phase-window search algorithm that enables faithful region attribution with near-linear complexity. PhaseWin replaces traditional quadratic-cost greedy selection with a phased coarse-to-fine search, combining adaptive pruning, windowed fine-grained selection, and dynamic supervision mechanisms to closely approximate greedy behavior while dramatically reducing model evaluations. Theoretically, PhaseWin retains near-greedy approximation guarantees under mild monotone submodular assumptions. Empirically, PhaseWin achieves over 95% of greedy attribution faithfulness using only 20% of the computational budget, and consistently outperforms other attribution baselines across object detection and visual grounding tasks with Grounding DINO and Florence-2. PhaseWin establishes a new state of the art in scalable, high-faithfulness attribution for object-level multimodal models.