Evaluating the Robustness of Interpretability Methods through Explanation Invariance and Equivariance
Authors: Jonathan Crabbé, Mihaela van der Schaar
AI-generated Key Points
- Interpretability methods are crucial for understanding complex machine learning models.
- Explanation invariance and equivariance are necessary to ensure accurate explanations of these models.
- Two metrics, invariance and equivariance scores, can measure the robustness of interpretability methods with respect to model symmetry groups.
- The authors provide theoretical robustness guarantees for some popular interpretability methods and a systematic approach to increase their invariance with respect to a symmetry group.
- Empirical measurements of the metrics were conducted on various modalities and symmetry groups, leading to five guidelines for producing robust explanations:
- Use multiple symmetries when aggregating explanations
- Ensure interpretations are consistent across different samples within a dataset
- Evaluate interpretability methods on diverse datasets with varying levels of complexity
- Test interpretability methods on models trained with different hyperparameters or architectures
- Use domain-specific knowledge when designing interpretation tasks
- Following these guidelines can lead to more reliable interpretations that accurately capture the underlying mechanisms driving complex machine learning models.
Abstract: Interpretability methods are valuable only if their explanations faithfully describe the explained model. In this work, we consider neural networks whose predictions are invariant under a specific symmetry group. This includes popular architectures, ranging from convolutional to graph neural networks. Any explanation that faithfully explains this type of model needs to be in agreement with this invariance property. We formalize this intuition through the notion of explanation invariance and equivariance by leveraging the formalism from geometric deep learning. Through this rigorous formalism, we derive (1) two metrics to measure the robustness of any interpretability method with respect to the model symmetry group; (2) theoretical robustness guarantees for some popular interpretability methods and (3) a systematic approach to increase the invariance of any interpretability method with respect to a symmetry group. By empirically measuring our metrics for explanations of models associated with various modalities and symmetry groups, we derive a set of 5 guidelines to allow users and developers of interpretability methods to produce robust explanations.
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