The paper introduces a novel framework for extracting model-agnostic human interpretable rules to explain a classifier's output. The human interpretable rule is defined as an axis-aligned hyper-cuboid containing the instance for which the classification decision has to be explained. The proposed procedure finds the largest (high \textit{coverage}) axis-aligned hyper-cuboid such that a high percentage of the instances in the hyper-cuboid have the same class label as the instance being explained (high \textit{precision}). Novel approximations to the coverage and precision measures in terms of the parameters of the hyper-cuboid are defined. They are maximized using gradient-based optimizers. The quality of the approximations is rigorously analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Heuristics for simplifying the generated explanations for achieving better interpretability and a greedy selection algorithm that combines the local explanations for creating global explanations for the model covering a large part of the instance space are also proposed. The framework is model agnostic, can be applied to any arbitrary classifier, and all types of attributes (including continuous, ordered, and unordered discrete). The wide-scale applicability of the framework is validated on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets from different domains (tabular, text, and image).
University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）；Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）
The application of machine learning based decision making systems in safety critical areas requires reliable high certainty predictions. Reject options are a common way of ensuring a sufficiently high certainty of predictions made by the system. While being able to reject uncertain samples is important, it is also of importance to be able to explain why a particular sample was rejected. However, explaining general reject options is still an open problem. We propose a model agnostic method for locally explaining arbitrary reject options by means of interpretable models and counterfactual explan…
Comparison of decision trees with Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) technique and multi-linear regression for explaining support vector regression model in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) values
Deep convolutional networks have been quite successful at various image classification tasks. The current methods to explain the predictions of a pre-trained model rely on gradient information, often resulting in saliency maps that focus on the foreground object as a whole. However, humans typically reason by dissecting an image and pointing out the presence of smaller concepts. The final output is often an aggregation of the presence or absence of these smaller concepts. In this work, we propose MACE: a Model Agnostic Concept Extractor, which can explain the working of a convolutional network…
University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；IRIT, CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心图卢兹计算机科学研究所）
Despite the progress observed with model-agnostic explainable AI (XAI), it is the case that model-agnostic XAI can produce incorrect explanations. One alternative are the so-called formal approaches to XAI, that include PI-explanations. Unfortunately, PI-explanations also exhibit important drawbacks, the most visible of which is arguably their size. The computation of relevant features serves to trade off probabilistic precision for the number of features in an explanation. However, even for very simple classifiers, the complexity of computing sets of relevant features is prohibitive. This pap…
Deep CNNs, though have achieved the state of the art performance in image classification tasks, remain a black-box to a human using them. There is a growing interest in explaining the working of these deep models to improve their trustworthiness. In this paper, we introduce a Posthoc Architecture-agnostic Concept Extractor (PACE) that automatically extracts smaller sub-regions of the image called concepts relevant to the black-box prediction. PACE tightly integrates the faithfulness of the explanatory framework to the black-box model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that e…
Lenovo Research（联想研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Explainability is a gateway between Artificial Intelligence and society as the current popular deep learning models are generally weak in explaining the reasoning process and prediction results. Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation (LIME) is a recent technique that explains the predictions of any classifier faithfully by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction. However, the sampling operation in the standard implementation of LIME is defective. Perturbed samples are generated from a uniform distribution, ignoring the complicated correlation between features. Thi…
University of Campinas（坎皮纳斯大学）；Leeds University Business School（利兹大学商学院）；COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）
The use of algorithm-agnostic approaches is an emerging area of research for explaining the contribution of individual features towards the predicted outcome. Whilst there is a focus on explaining the prediction itself, a little has been done on explaining the robustness of these models, that is, how each feature contributes towards achieving that robustness. In this paper, we propose the use of Shapley values to explain the contribution of each feature towards the model's robustness, measured in terms of Receiver-operating Characteristics (ROC) curve and the Area under the ROC curve (AUC). Wi…
Explaining the behavior of a black box machine learning model at the instance level is useful for building trust. However, it is also important to understand how the model behaves globally. Such an understanding provides insight into both the data on which the model was trained and the patterns that it learned. We present here an approach that learns if-then rules to globally explain the behavior of black box machine learning models that have been used to solve classification problems. The approach works by first extracting conditions that were important at the instance level and then evolving…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Ahold Delhaize（皇家阿霍德德尔海兹集团）
Understanding how "black-box" models arrive at their predictions has sparked significant interest from both within and outside the AI community. Our work focuses on doing this by generating local explanations about individual predictions for tree-based ensembles, specifically Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs). Given a correctly predicted instance in the training set, we wish to generate a counterfactual explanation for this instance, that is, the minimal perturbation of this instance such that the prediction flips to the opposite class. Most existing methods for counterfactual explanati…
Lenovo Research（联想研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Despite outstanding contribution to the significant progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep learning models remain mostly black boxes, which are extremely weak in explainability of the reasoning process and prediction results. Explainability is not only a gateway between AI and society but also a powerful tool to detect flaws in the model and biases in the data. Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation (LIME) is a recent approach that uses an interpretable model to form a local explanation for the individual prediction result. The current implementation of LIME adopts the linear r…
Current interpretability methods focus on explaining a particular model's decision through present input features. Such methods do not inform the user of the sufficient conditions that alter these decisions when they are not desirable. Contrastive explanations circumvent this problem by providing explanations of the form "If the feature $X>x$, the output $Y$ would be different''. While different approaches are developed to find contrasts; these methods do not all deal with mutability and attainability constraints. In this work, we present a novel approach to locally contrast the prediction of …
The last decade witnessed an ever-increasing stream of successes in Machine Learning (ML). These successes offer clear evidence that ML is bound to become pervasive in a wide range of practical uses, including many that directly affect humans. Unfortunately, the operation of the most successful ML models is incomprehensible for human decision makers. As a result, the use of ML models, especially in high-risk and safety-critical settings is not without concern. In recent years, there have been efforts on devising approaches for explaining ML models. Most of these efforts have focused on so-call…
AI business process applications automate high-stakes business decisions where there is an increasing demand to justify or explain the rationale behind algorithmic decisions. Business process applications have ordering or constraints on tasks and feature values that cause lightweight, model-agnostic, existing explanation methods like LIME to fail. In response, we propose a local explanation framework extending LIME for explaining AI business process applications. Empirical evaluation of our extension underscores the advantage of our approach in the business process setting.
We explore the problem of step-wise explaining how to solve constraint satisfaction problems, with a use case on logic grid puzzles. More specifically, we study the problem of explaining the inference steps that one can take during propagation, in a way that is easy to interpret for a person. Thereby, we aim to give the constraint solver explainable agency, which can help in building trust in the solver by being able to understand and even learn from the explanations. The main challenge is that of finding a sequence of simple explanations, where each explanation should aim to be as cognitively…
Due to the black-box nature of deep learning models, methods for explaining the models' results are crucial to gain trust from humans and support collaboration between AIs and humans. In this paper, we consider several model-agnostic and model-specific explanation methods for CNNs for text classification and conduct three human-grounded evaluations, focusing on different purposes of explanations: (1) revealing model behavior, (2) justifying model predictions, and (3) helping humans investigate uncertain predictions. The results highlight dissimilar qualities of the various explanation methods …
Explaining Black-box Model Predictions via Two-level Nested Feature Attributions with Consistency Property
STAIR Lab, Chiba Institute of Technology（千叶技术学院STAIR实验室）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学数学与统计学学院）；ZOZO Research（ZOZO研究）
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of domains such as security, finance, healthcare, medicine, and criminal justice. Explaining the decisions of AI systems in human terms is a key challenge--due to the high complexity of the model, as well as the potential implications on human interests, rights, and lives . While Explainable AI is an emerging field of research, there is no consensus on the definition, quantification, and formalization of explainability. In fact, the quantification of explainability is an open challenge. In our previous work, we incorporated domain knowle…
ISTI-CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息科学与技术研究所）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）
The recent years have witnessed the rise of accurate but obscure decision systems which hide the logic of their internal decision processes to the users. The lack of explanations for the decisions of black box systems is a key ethical issue, and a limitation to the adoption of machine learning components in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. %Therefore, we need explanations that reveals the reasons why a predictor takes a certain decision. In this paper we focus on the problem of black box outcome explanation, i.e., explaining the reasons of the decision taken on a specific insta…
We propose Black Box Explanations through Transparent Approximations (BETA), a novel model agnostic framework for explaining the behavior of any black-box classifier by simultaneously optimizing for fidelity to the original model and interpretability of the explanation. To this end, we develop a novel objective function which allows us to learn (with optimality guarantees), a small number of compact decision sets each of which explains the behavior of the black box model in unambiguous, well-defined regions of feature space. Furthermore, our framework also is capable of accepting user input wh…
Revealing the Gap in Human and VLM Scene Description through Counterfactual Semantic Saliency
Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校计算机科学系）；Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校心理学与脑科学系）
