Did Models Sufficient Learn? Attribution-Guided Training via Subset-Selected Counterfactual Augmentation

In current visual model training, models often rely on only limited sufficient causes for their predictions, which makes them sensitive to distribution shifts or the absence of key features. Attribution methods can accurately identify a model's critical regions. However, masking these areas to create counterfactuals often causes the model to misclassify the target, while humans can still easily recognize it. This divergence highlights that the model's learned dependencies may not be sufficiently causal. To address this issue, we propose Subset-Selected Counterfactual Augmentation (SS-CA), which integrates counterfactual explanations directly into the training process for targeted intervention. Building on the subset-selection-based LIMA attribution method, we develop Counterfactual LIMA to identify minimal spatial region sets whose removal can selectively alter model predictions. Leveraging these attributions, we introduce a data augmentation strategy that replaces the identified regions with natural background, and we train the model jointly on both augmented and original samples to mitigate incomplete causal learning. Extensive experiments across multiple ImageNet variants show that SS-CA improves generalization on in-distribution (ID) test data and achieves superior performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks such as ImageNet-R and ImageNet-S. Under perturbations including noise, models trained with SS-CA also exhibit enhanced generalization, demonstrating that our approach effectively uses interpretability insights to correct model deficiencies and improve both performance and robustness.

Fast Fractional Programming for Multi-Cell Integrated Sensing and Communications

This paper concerns the coordinate multi-cell beamforming design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). In particular, we assume that each base station (BS) has massive antennas. The optimization objective is to maximize a weighted sum of the data rates (for communications) and the Fisher information (for sensing). We first show that the conventional beamforming method for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, i.e., the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) algorithm, has a natural extension to the ISAC problem scenario from a fractional programming (FP) perspective. However, the extended WMMSE algorithm requires computing the $N\times N$ matrix inverse extensively, where $N$ is proportional to the antenna array size, so the algorithm becomes quite costly when antennas are massively deployed. To address this issue, we develop a nonhomogeneous bound and use it in conjunction with the FP technique to solve the ISAC beamforming problem without the need to invert any large matrices. It is further shown that the resulting new FP algorithm has an intimate connection with gradient projection, based on which we can accelerate the convergence via Nesterov's gradient extrapolation.