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Signal or Noise? Auditing Rotation-Induced Saliency Drift in Medical and Aerial Imaging

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 2, 2026 · UTC

Post-hoc saliency maps such as Grad-CAM are increasingly used to audit why a deployed vision model made a decision, yet the heatmap drifts when the input is rotated, even when the prediction is unchanged. In domains with no canonical orientation, such as histopathology and aerial imagery, this undermines using saliency as evidence. We ask whether that drift is faithful signal or noise introduced by the CAM operator, and answer it by measuring equivariance at every stage of the operator rather than inferring it from the network's output. The instability is not where one would guess: the channel

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