arXiv:2601.23068cs.LGcs.AI2026-01被引 1

无需模型访问即可估算特征重要性,实现零样本解释。

ExplainerPFN: Towards tabular foundation models for model-free zero-shot feature importance estimations

  • 基于合成数据预训练,学习数据驱动的特征归因分布。
  • 仅需少量参考样本(2个)即达高精度SHAP一致性。
  • 首个无需模型或解释样本的零样本特征重要性方法,适合黑箱场景。

在监督分类任务中计算特征重要性对模型可解释性至关重要。尽管Shapley值广泛用于解释预测结果,但通常需要访问底层模型,这一假设在真实部署中常被违反。本文研究是否可在零样本设置下,仅使用输入数据分布而无需评估目标模型,获得有意义的特征归因。由于多个模型可能产生相同预测但给出不同Shapley分解,从数据到归因的映射不唯一。因此,我们聚焦于“忠实于数据”的归因,通过元训练先验学习后验均值归因。为此,提出ExplainerPFN,一种基于TabPFN的表格基础模型,在包含精确或近似Shapley值的合成结构因果数据集上预训练,可对未见表格数据进行无模型、无梯度、无示例解释的特征归因预测。贡献包括:(1) 少样本代理解释器仅用2个参考观测即可实现高SHAP保真度;(2) 提出首个无需模型或参考解释的零样本归因方法,适用于现有解释器无法应用的场景;(3) 开源完整训练流程与合成数据生成器;(4) 在真实与合成数据集上实验证明,ExplainerPFN性能媲美依赖2-10个SHAP示例的少样本代理解释器。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Computing the importance of features in supervised classification tasks is critical for model interpretability. Shapley values are a widely used approach for explaining model predictions, but require direct access to the underlying model, an assumption frequently violated in real-world deployments. We investigate whether meaningful feature attributions can be obtained in a zero-shot setting, using only the input data distribution and no evaluations of the target model. Because multiple models can produce identical predictions yet yield different Shapley decompositions, the mapping from data to attributions is not uniquely identifiable. We therefore target attributions that are "true to the data" rather than "true to the model", learning a posterior mean attribution under a meta-training prior. To this end, we introduce ExplainerPFN, a tabular foundation model built on TabPFN, pretrained on synthetic structural causal datasets supervised with exact or near-exact Shapley values, that predicts feature attributions for unseen tabular datasets without model access, gradients, or example explanations. Our contributions are fourfold: (1) we show that few-shot surrogate explainers achieve high SHAP fidelity with as few as two reference observations; (2) we propose ExplainerPFN, the first zero-shot method for estimating Shapley-value-style feature attributions without access to the underlying model or reference explanations, providing a principled attribution where no existing explainer can be applied; (3) we release an open-source implementation including the full training pipeline and synthetic data generator; and (4) through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, we show that ExplainerPFN achieves performance competitive with few-shot surrogate explainers that rely on 2-10 SHAP examples.

特征重要性零样本可解释性表格模型

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