arXiv:2504.10833cs.LGcs.AI2025-04被引 1

提出新方法评估概念解释的忠实性,发现许多视觉吸引人的解释其实不准确。

Measuring the (Un)Faithfulness of Concept-Based Explanations

  • 用线性代理模型替代复杂代理,保持解释可读性同时准确衡量忠实性
  • 设计新指标全面评估所有类别输出的损失,而非仅预测类别
  • 首次揭示众多主流无监督概念解释方法其实缺乏忠实性,适合可信AI研究者

深度视觉模型的输入输出计算难以解释。概念基础解释方法(CBEMs)通过用人类可理解的语义单元(即概念)重述模型部分来提升可解释性。验证解释是否忠实——即反映模型内部计算——需要一个结合概念的代理模型。为提升可解释性所做的简化不可避免地降低忠实性,导致两者间的权衡。现有无监督CBEMs(U-CBEMs)看似更可解释且更忠实,但我们发现其报告的忠实性提升实际上源于(1)使用过于复杂的代理模型,引入未测量的可解释性成本,或(2)依赖删除法,而我们证明该方法无法正确衡量忠实性。为此,我们提出代理忠实性(SURF),(1)以简单线性代理替代先前复杂代理,衡量忠实性而不影响解释可读性;(2)引入有充分动机的指标,评估所有输出类别的损失,而非仅预测类别。通过测量-测量研究验证SURF,提出一个简单合理性检查——随机概念的解释应更不忠实——而以往代理模型未能通过该检验。SURF实现了对U-CBEMs的首个可靠忠实性基准,揭示许多视觉吸引人的U-CBEMs并不忠实。代码已发布于 https://github.com/skumar-ml/surf-eval。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Deep vision models perform input-output computations that are hard to interpret. Concept-based explanation methods (CBEMs) increase interpretability by re-expressing parts of the model with human-understandable semantic units, or concepts. Checking if the derived explanations are faithful -- that is, they represent the model's internal computation -- requires a surrogate that combines concepts to compute the output. Simplifications made for interpretability inevitably reduce faithfulness, resulting in a tradeoff between the two. State-of-the-art unsupervised CBEMs (U-CBEMs) are seemingly more interpretable, while also being more faithful to the model. However, we observe that the reported improvement in faithfulness artificially results from either (1) using overly complex surrogates, which introduces an unmeasured cost to the explanation's interpretability, or (2) relying on deletion-based approaches that, as we demonstrate, do not properly measure faithfulness. We propose Surrogate Faithfulness (SURF), which (1) replaces prior complex surrogates with a simple, linear surrogate that measures faithfulness without changing the explanation's interpretability and (2) introduces well-motivated metrics that assess loss across all output classes, not just the predicted class. We validate SURF with a measure-over-measure study by proposing a simple sanity check -- explanations with random concepts should be less faithful -- which prior surrogates fail. SURF enables the first reliable faithfulness benchmark of U-CBEMs, revealing that many visually compelling U-CBEMs are not faithful. Code is released at https://github.com/skumar-ml/surf-eval .

可解释性忠实性评估深度学习

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