HullProbe: Measuring Interventional Part Reliance in Maritime Vessel Classifiers

Overview & Synopsis

Recognizing a vessel's type from an image supports maritime surveillance and sanctions monitoring, but a classifier can reach high accuracy by leaning on the generic hull instead of the more distinctive superstructure, and is then fooled when a vessel is re-hulled or occluded. De-biasing methods claim to remove such reliance, yet the field certifies them with worst-group accuracy, a proxy that needs group labels and only infers reliance from accuracy. We measure the reliance directly. HullProbe swaps a registered anatomical part of a vessel for another instance's and reads how much that part drives the decision, using a same-class swap to control for compositing artifacts. Because a surface vessel is a hull and a superstructure arranged along one axis, its parts form a 2x3 grid whose 2^6 = 64 swaps we evaluate exhaustively, and a single Walsh transform returns each part's interventional influence and its interaction spectrum. On planted shortcuts, where the true reliance is known, the measure tracks worst-group accuracy (r = -0.94 over 45 configurations), and replacing its learned segmenter with human annotations changes the hull-share by less than the audit's resolution. On the 26 vessel types of MARVEL, the classifier places about 46% of its corrected sensitivity on the generic hull yet follows the superstructure when the two conflict, and the group-label-free de-biasers available there do not detectably reduce the hull's share. The findings hold across three architectures and a second maritime dataset, and the method extends to fine-grained vehicle recognition on Stanford Cars.