Attribution Instability in Vision Transformers: The Role of Residual Cancellation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are central to most modern vision models, yet obtaining input attributions that are fine-grained, faithful, and stable remains challenging. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) has been adapted to transformer attention, but in ViTs it often produces noisy, unfaithful explanations. We show that the missing ingredient is the treatment of residual connections: cancellation effects in residual pathways lead to attribution explosion. Moreover, we find that these cancellations are substantially stronger in ViTs than in language transformers. To address this issue, we introduce Residual-aware Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (ResLRP), an extension of LRP whose propagation rules explicitly account for cancellations in residual branches, are exactly conservative, and provably bound relevance explosion. Causal channel-wise interventions confirm that residual cancellation, not a generic regularization effect, drives the instability. ResLRP substantially improves attribution quality across faithfulness and localization, evaluated on ViT architectures spanning supervised, self-supervised, contrastive, hierarchical, and multimodal families, as well as on the ground-truth-controlled FunnyBirds benchmark. The largest gains arise in modern Vision Language Models (VLMs), with +27-29% localization and up to 3.4x faithfulness scores. Beyond benchmarks, ResLRP localizes Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features in input space, and our residual amplification measure serves as an architecture-level diagnostic predicting where attribution degrades.