English Reference

Word

salience

UK/sˈeɪliəns/

Definition

n. how prominent, noticeable, or influential a specific detail is in catching attention or deciding an outcome.

n. the state or quality of being prominent or conspicuous; in machine learning and vision, a measure of how influential a specific input region is on model activations.

Examples

“The bright red stop sign had high visual salience on the quiet country road.”

“A salience map highlights which pixels in the photograph were most critical to the classifier's verdict.”

“Computing gradient-weighted class activation maps extracts visual salience without requiring architectural modifications to the underlying convolutional backbone.”

Examples

simple

“The bright red stop sign had high visual salience on the quiet country road.”

contextual

“A salience map highlights which pixels in the photograph were most critical to the classifier's verdict.”

complex

“Computing gradient-weighted class activation maps extracts visual salience without requiring architectural modifications to the underlying convolutional backbone.”

Real-World Examples

“The results showed that both meaning and salience predicted the distribution of attention, but that when the relationship between meaning and salience was controlled, only meaning accounted for unique variance in attention.”
Nature Human Behaviour · 25 Sept 2017

Etymology

From Latin salientem, present participle of salire ('to leap, spring'). In modern psychology and computer vision, referring to features that 'leap out' at an observer or model.

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Word family

salienceNounsalientAdjective

Domains

AIComputingLinguistics

This entry

Level
C1 · Advanced
Frequency
Rare
Updated

Scan code

englishreference.com/q/salience

English Reference