What Sketch Explainability Really Means for Downstream Tasks?
Authors: Hmrishav Bandyopadhyay, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Aneeshan Sain, Tao Xiang, Yi-Zhe Song

In this paper we explore the unique modality of sketch for explainability emphasising the profound impact of human strokes compared to conventional pixel-oriented studies. Beyond explanations of network behavior we discern the genuine implications of explainability across diverse downstream sketch-related tasks. We propose a lightweight and portable explainability solution -- a seamless plugin that integrates effortlessly with any pre-trained model eliminating the need for re-training. Demonstrating its adaptability we present four applications: highly studied retrieval and generation and completely novel assisted drawing and sketch adversarial attacks. The centrepiece to our solution is a stroke-level attribution map that takes different forms when linked with downstream tasks. By addressing the inherent non-differentiability of rasterisation we enable explanations at both coarse stroke level (SLA) and partial stroke level (P-SLA) each with its advantages for specific downstream tasks.