State space models (SSM) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently shown significant potential in long-sequence modeling. Since the complexity of transformers’ self-attention mechanism is quadratic with image size, as well as increasing computational demands, researchers are currently exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey that aims to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models within the domain of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba’s success, including the SSM framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Then, we review these vision Mamba models by categorizing them into foundational models and those enhanced with techniques including convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. Furthermore, we investigate the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D/3D segmentation, classification, image registration, etc.), and remote sensing visual tasks. In particular, we introduce general visual tasks from two levels: high/mid-level vision (e.g., object detection, segmentation, video classification, etc.) and low-level vision (e.g., image super-resolution, image restoration, visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.

Adversarial attacks, i.e., generating adversarial perturbations with a small magnitude to deceive deep neural networks, are important for investigating and improving model trustworthiness. Traditionally, the topic was scoped within 2D images without considering 3D multiview information. Benefiting from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), one can easily reconstruct a 3D scene with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) from given 2D views and synthesize photo-realistic renderings of novel vantages. This opens up a door to discussing the possibility of undertaking to attack multiview NeRF network with downstream tasks from different rendering angles, which we denote Neural Radiance Fiels-based multiview adversarial Attack (NeRFail). The goal is, given one scene and a subset of views, to deceive the recognition results of agnostic view angles as well as given views. To do so, we propose a transformation mapping from pixels to 3D points such that our attack generates multiview adversarial perturbations by attacking a subset of images with different views, intending to prevent the downstream classifier from correctly predicting images rendered by NeRF from other views. Experiments show that our multiview adversarial perturbations successfully obfuscate the downstream classifier at both known and unknown views. Notably, when retraining another NeRF on the perturbed training data, we show that the perturbation can be inherited and reproduced. The code can be found at https://github.com/jiang-wenxiang/NeRFail.

Saliency maps are a popular approach for explaining classifications of (convolutional) neural networks. However, it remains an open question as to how best to evaluate salience maps, with three families of evaluation methods commonly being used: subjective user measures, objective user measures, and mathematical metrics. We examine three of the most popular saliency map approaches (viz., LIME, Grad-CAM, and Guided Backpropagation) in a between subject study (N=166) across these families of evaluation methods. We test 1) for subjective measures, if the maps differ with respect to user trust and satisfaction; 2) for objective measures, if the maps increase users' abilities and thus understanding of a model; 3) for mathematical metrics, which map achieves the best ratings across metrics; and 4) whether the mathematical metrics can be associated with objective user measures. To our knowledge, our study is the first to compare several salience maps across all these evaluation methods$-$with the finding that they do not agree in their assessment (i.e., there was no difference concerning trust and satisfaction, Grad-CAM improved users' abilities best, and Guided Backpropagation had the most favorable mathematical metrics). Additionally, we show that some mathematical metrics were associated with user understanding, although this relationship was often counterintuitive. We discuss these findings in light of general debates concerning the complementary use of user studies and mathematical metrics in the evaluation of explainable AI (XAI) approaches.

State space models (SSMs) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently demonstrated significant promise in long-sequence modeling. Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers has quadratic complexity with image size and increasing computational demands, the researchers are now exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey aiming to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models in the field of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba's success, including the state space model framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Next, we review these vision mamba models by categorizing them into foundational ones and enhancing them with techniques such as convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. We further delve into the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, Medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D / 3D segmentation, classification, and image registration, etc.), and Remote Sensing visual tasks. We specially introduce general visual tasks from two levels: High/Mid-level vision (e.g., Object detection, Segmentation, Video classification, etc.) and Low-level vision (e.g., Image super-resolution, Image restoration, Visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.

Explainable AI (XAI) is crucial for building transparent and trustworthy machine learning systems, especially in high-stakes domains. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have emerged as a promising ante-hoc approach that provides interpretable, concept-level explanations by explicitly modeling human-understandable concepts. However, existing CBMs often suffer from poor locality faithfulness, failing to spatially align concepts with meaningful image regions, which limits their interpretability and reliability. In this work, we propose SL-CBM (CBM with Semantic Locality), a novel extension that enforces locality faithfulness by generating spatially coherent saliency maps at both concept and class levels. SL-CBM integrates a 1x1 convolutional layer with a cross-attention mechanism to enhance alignment between concepts, image regions, and final predictions. Unlike prior methods, SL-CBM produces faithful saliency maps inherently tied to the model's internal reasoning, facilitating more effective debugging and intervention. Extensive experiments on image datasets demonstrate that SL-CBM substantially improves locality faithfulness, explanation quality, and intervention efficacy while maintaining competitive classification accuracy. Our ablation studies highlight the importance of contrastive and entropy-based regularization for balancing accuracy, sparsity, and faithfulness. Overall, SL-CBM bridges the gap between concept-based reasoning and spatial explainability, setting a new standard for interpretable and trustworthy concept-based models.