arXiv:2511.09299cs.LG2025-11被引 2

将神经网络精确转为决策树,实现真正可信的模型解释。

Efficiently Transforming Neural Networks into Decision Trees: A Path to Ground Truth Explanations with RENTT

  • 提出RENTT算法,可精确转换神经网络为等效决策树。
  • 在多种网络结构下保持高效率,且计算时间与内存开销可控。
  • 能给出全局、局部或区域的真特征重要性,优于传统方法。

尽管神经网络性能强大,但其决策过程不透明,导致信任度不足。现有可解释AI方法常因缺乏忠实性而提供错误解释。近期有研究尝试将神经网络转化为决策树以解决此问题,但普遍存在精确性差、可扩展性弱或可解释性不足的缺陷。本文针对卷积神经网络、循环神经网络、非ReLU激活函数及偏置项等复杂情况,提出通用化理论框架,并设计高效算法RENTT,实现神经网络到等效决策树的精确转换,兼具运行时和内存效率。所得决策树为多变量结构,可能难以理解,因此进一步提供基于等效决策树的真特征重要性计算方法,适用于整个模型(全局)、特定输入区域(区域)或单个决策(局部)。所有理论均经数值实验验证,结果表明RENTT在计算效率与可扩展性上表现优异,且唯一能揭示真实解释,远超LIME、SHAP等近似方法。代码已公开于https://github.com/HelenaM23/RENTT。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Although neural networks are a powerful tool, their widespread use is hindered by the opacity of their decisions and their black-box nature, which result in a lack of trustworthiness. To alleviate this problem, methods in the field of explainable Artificial Intelligence try to unveil how such automated decisions are made. But explainable AI methods are often plagued by missing faithfulness/correctness, meaning that they sometimes provide explanations that do not align with the neural network's decision and logic. Recently, transformations to decision trees have been proposed to overcome such problems. Unfortunately, they typically lack exactness, scalability, or interpretability as the size of the neural network grows. Thus, we generalize these previous results, especially by considering convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, non-ReLU activation functions, and bias terms. Our findings are accompanied by rigorous proofs and we present a novel algorithm RENTT (Runtime Efficient Network to Tree Transformation) designed to compute an exact equivalent decision tree representation of neural networks in a manner that is both runtime and memory efficient. The resulting decision trees are multivariate and thus, possibly too complex to understand. To alleviate this problem, we also provide a method to calculate the ground truth feature importance for neural networks via the equivalent decision trees - for entire models (global), specific input regions (regional), or single decisions (local). All theoretical results are supported by detailed numerical experiments that emphasize two key aspects: the computational efficiency and scalability of our algorithm, and that only RENTT succeeds in uncovering ground truth explanations compared to conventional approximation methods like LIME and SHAP. All code is available at https://github.com/HelenaM23/RENTT .

模型解释决策树可解释AI神经网络

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