提出首个能保证最优的神经元组合解释方法,解决传统搜索不靠谱的问题。
Guaranteed Optimal Compositional Explanations for Neurons
- 通过分解影响空间对齐的因素,精准定位关键变量
- 发现10%-40%现有解释在概念重叠时并非最优
- 算法效率媲美贪心搜索,却能保证结果最优,适合追求准确性的研究者
组合解释旨在通过逻辑规则描述神经元感受野激活与概念之间的空间对齐关系,通常通过遍历所有可能的概念组合进行搜索。由于在整个状态空间上计算空间对齐在计算上不可行,现有方法常依赖组合结构假设并使用束搜索来限制状态空间。然而,束搜索无法提供任何理论上的最优性保证,当前解释距离真实最优仍不清楚。本文首次提出一个可在所采纳假设覆盖的整个状态空间中计算保证最优组合解释的框架。具体包括:(i) 一种识别影响空间对齐因素的分解方法;(ii) 一种在搜索过程中任意阶段估计对齐度的启发式策略;(iii) 首个能在时间复杂度接近穷举束搜索的前提下计算最优组合解释的算法。利用该框架,我们证明当存在概念重叠时,先前用束搜索获得的解释有10%-40%为次优。最后,我们评估了基于所提分解与启发式的束搜索变体,结果显示其运行时间优于或匹配现有方法,同时在超参数和计算资源方面具有更高灵活性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Compositional explanations are a family of methods that aim to describe the spatial alignment between neurons' receptive field activations and concepts through logical rules, typically computed via a search over all possible concept combinations. Since computing the spatial alignment over the entire state space is computationally infeasible, the literature commonly adopts assumptions related to the structure of the combinations and beam search to restrict the state space. However, beam search cannot provide any theoretical guarantees of optimality, and it remains unclear how close current explanations are to the true optimum. In this theoretical paper, we address this gap by introducing the first framework for computing guaranteed optimal compositional explanations over the entire state space spanned by the adopted assumptions. Specifically, we propose: (i) a decomposition that identifies the factors influencing the spatial alignment, (ii) a heuristic to estimate the alignment at any stage of the search, and (iii) the first algorithm that can compute optimal compositional explanations in a time comparable to exhaustive beam search. Using this framework, we demonstrate that 10-40% of explanations previously obtained with beam search are suboptimal when overlapping concepts are involved. Finally, we evaluate a beam-search variant guided by our proposed decomposition and heuristic, showing that it matches or improves runtime over prior methods while offering greater flexibility in hyperparameters and computational resources.
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