MultiSHAP: A Shapley-Based Framework for Explaining Cross-Modal Interactions in Multimodal AI Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00576v1
• Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2025 12:19:18 GMT
• Title: MultiSHAP: A Shapley-Based Framework for Explaining Cross-Modal Interactions in Multimodal AI Models
• Authors: Zhanliang Wang, Kai Wang,
• Abstract summary: Multimodal AI models have achieved impressive performance in tasks that require integrating information from multiple modalities, such as vision and language.<n>How to explain cross-modal interactions in multimodal AI models remains a major challenge.
• Score: 5.011371514152517
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Multimodal AI models have achieved impressive performance in tasks that require integrating information from multiple modalities, such as vision and language. However, their "black-box" nature poses a major barrier to deployment in high-stakes applications where interpretability and trustworthiness are essential. How to explain cross-modal interactions in multimodal AI models remains a major challenge. While existing model explanation methods, such as attention map and Grad-CAM, offer coarse insights into cross-modal relationships, they cannot precisely quantify the synergistic effects between modalities, and are limited to open-source models with accessible internal weights. Here we introduce MultiSHAP, a model-agnostic interpretability framework that leverages the Shapley Interaction Index to attribute multimodal predictions to pairwise interactions between fine-grained visual and textual elements (such as image patches and text tokens), while being applicable to both open- and closed-source models. Our approach provides: (1) instance-level explanations that reveal synergistic and suppressive cross-modal effects for individual samples - "why the model makes a specific prediction on this input", and (2) dataset-level explanation that uncovers generalizable interaction patterns across samples - "how the model integrates information across modalities". Experiments on public multimodal benchmarks confirm that MultiSHAP faithfully captures cross-modal reasoning mechanisms, while real-world case studies demonstrate its practical utility. Our framework is extensible beyond two modalities, offering a general solution for interpreting complex multimodal AI models.

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