Class Activation Mapping in Explainable Computer Vision: A Method-Centered Review of CNN, Transformer, and Foundation-Model-Era Visual Explanations

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arXiv:2608.12299v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class activation mapping (CAM) is one of the most widely used visual explanation families in explainable artificial intelligence. Its purpose is intuitive: it converts internal model evidence into a heatmap that highlights the image regions, convolutional channels, tokens, or patches that support a target class or concept. Since the first CAM formulation in 2016, the field has moved far beyond global-average-pooled CNN classifiers. CAM-st