LIME visualization outputs padded regions as important - Mel-spectrogram (audio analysis) I am encoding audios as Mel-spectrograms and using these Mel-spectrograms as input to my deep learning model (Inception-ResNet V2). The input image is of size 256 X 256, made up of a 128 X 64 spectrogram (128 melbands) along with zero padding. Sample input:

I am using LIME to visualize the important regions of a Mel-spectrogram. In some Mel-spectrograms, LIME is labelling the padded regions as important, like in this image.



So, is this happening because of poor learning or is this a genuine problem with LIME when it encounters padded regions?
Feeding the neural network 75% irrelevant data (zero padding) seems less-than-ideal, both in terms of computational inefficiency and because it makes your model potentially vulnerable to this data.

I would consider a smaller model with 128x128 input input format (ex: MobileNet). You can either upscale the mel-spectrograms you have now from 128x64 -> 128x128 or extract windows that are 128 long (potentially adjusting FFT/hop size to make the window cover same area in time).