Explanation of Dynamic Physical Field Predictions using WassersteinGrad: Application to Autoregressive Weather Forecasting
For meteorologists and practitioners using autoregressive neural weather forecasts, this provides a more reliable explanation method by addressing spatial misalignment in attribution maps.
The paper identifies a failure mode in gradient-based feature attribution for dynamic physical fields: stochastic perturbations cause geometric displacement rather than stationary noise, so pointwise averaging blurs attributions. WassersteinGrad computes entropic Wasserstein barycenters to extract geometric consensus, showing improved explainability over baselines on regional weather data.
As the demand to integrate Artificial Intelligence into high-stakes environments continues to grow, explaining the reasoning behind neural-network predictions has shifted from a theoretical curiosity to a strict operational requirement. Our work is motivated by the explanations of autoregressive neural predictions on dynamic physical fields, as in weather forecasting. Gradient-based feature attribution methods are widely used to explain the predictions on such data, in particular due to their scalability to high-dimensional inputs. It is also interesting to remark that gradient-based techniques such as SmoothGrad are now standard on images to robustify the explanations using pointwise averages of the attribution maps obtained from several noised inputs. Our goal is to efficiently adapt this aggregation strategy to dynamic physical fields. To do so, our first contribution is to identify a fundamental failure mode when averaging perturbed attribution maps on dynamic physical fields: stochastic input perturbations do not induce stationary amplitude noise in attribution maps, but instead cause a geometric displacement of the attributions. Consequently, pointwise averaging blurs these spatially misaligned features. To tackle this issue, we introduce WassersteinGrad, which extracts a geometric consensus of perturbed attribution maps by computing their entropic Wasserstein barycenter. The results, obtained on regional weather data and a meteorologist-validated neural model, demonstrate promising explainability properties of WassersteinGrad over gradient-based baselines across both single-step and autoregressive forecasting settings.