Cross-Dataset Transfer and Reliability of Explainable Artificial Intelligence for RhythmFormer Remote Photoplethysmography

Abstract

Background. Remote photoplethysmography estimates the cardiovascular pulse from facial video, and its explanations have rested on inspecting heatmaps rather than on quantitative evidence about where a model reads it. We quantified the explanations and asked whether such explanations transfer between datasets and track model performance. Method. We trained eight condition-specific RhythmFormer models on NCKU-rPPG, recorded under three illumination levels, speaking, rotation, and cycling, estimated one heart rate per 5.12-second clip, and set them beside a UBFC-rPPG reproduction. Raw attention, rollout, attention flow, and Beyond Intuition were assessed by skin coverage and the Salience-guided Faithfulness Coefficient (SaCo). Results. Beyond Intuition ranked highest on both datasets, at median coverage 0.789 and SaCo 0.837 on Static level 3 against 0.826 and 0.917 on UBFC-rPPG; lower ranks differed. Within one participant of one condition, neither measure was related to a clip's heart-rate error, waveform correlation, or signal-to-noise ratio on either dataset: 186 of the 252 coefficients fell below $|ρ|=0.10$ and 28 reached $p<0.05$ against the 13 expected by chance. Across the eight scenarios only Beyond Intuition's coverage followed the three performance measures, at $ρ=-0.43$, $+0.57$, and $+0.43$, while the attention-only methods' SaCo ran opposite to each. It failed at 40 lux alone, its median coverage falling to 0.180 and its median SaCo to $-0.178$, whereas motion degraded the estimates far more without such a drop. Conclusions. Skin coverage and SaCo carry information complementary to the performance measures rather than a proxy for them: attributing to the skin does not guarantee an accurate estimate. What an attribution reveals about a condition is where the model looks rather than how faithfully its map is ordered.