arXiv:2606.08497cs.AIcs.CL2026-06KDD

通过优化语言结构化的词子集,高效解释黑箱语言模型的决策依据。

Explaining Black-Box Language Models: Learning to Optimize Linguistically-Structured Word Subsets

论文配图:Explaining Black-Box Language Models: Learning to Optimize Linguistically-Structured Word Subsets
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于图结构知识,用强化学习选择有代表性的输入词子集。
  • 单次推理即完成解释,无需逐样本搜索,效率高且不引入异常行为。
  • 解释结果符合人类语言直觉,适合医疗等高风险场景的可信分析。

随着深度语言模型(DLMs)在医疗等高风险领域广泛应用,理解其决策逻辑对建立信任、保障安全与责任追溯至关重要。然而,当这些模型以黑箱形式运行(如通过API调用)时,无法访问内部状态(如参数、梯度),使得可解释性尤为困难。现有方法难以同时满足三个关键要求:(i) 推理时高效,(ii) 兼容黑箱且不引发分布外行为,(iii) 解释结果具备语言结构可读性。为此,我们提出一种通过选择少量关键输入词来解释DLM预测的方法。该问题被建模为可泛化的优化任务,支持无需输入特定搜索的一次性推理。选择策略采用类似REINFORCE的策略梯度训练,在完全无梯度的离散选择中实现端到端优化。为进一步提升可解释性并贴近人类语言直觉,我们在选择过程中融合图结构知识,生成具有语言连贯性的词子集,使解释既信息量高又具认知意义。我们在多种DLM架构和真实数据集上验证该方法,结果表明其始终能识别出更具判别力的词子集,并与语言显著特征更强对齐,优于传统黑箱兼容方法及获得模型梯度访问的基于梯度方法。代码已公开。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

As deep language models (DLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, understanding their decision rationale becomes paramount for ensuring trust, safety, and accountability. However, achieving this vital level of interpretability is particularly challenging when these DLMs operate as black-box systems (e.g., via APIs), where access to internal model states (e.g., parameters, gradients) is restricted. Despite numerous efforts, existing explanation methods often fail to concurrently satisfy three key desiderata: (i) inference-time efficiency, (ii) black-box compatibility without inducing out-of-distribution behavior, and (iii) comprehensible explanations grounded in the input's linguistic structure. To address these challenges, we propose a method that explains predictions of DLMs by selecting a small, informative subset of input words. We formulate this as an amortized optimization problem, enabling efficient one-shot inference without the need for input-specific search. Our selection policy is trained via REINFORCE-style policy gradients, allowing discrete word selection in a fully gradient-free setting. To enhance interpretability and align with human linguistic intuition, we integrate graph-structured knowledge into this selection process, fostering linguistically coherent subsets that result in explanations both highly informative and cognitively meaningful to end-users. We evaluated our method on diverse DLM architectures and multiple real-world datasets. It consistently identifies word subsets with enhanced discriminative power and stronger alignment with linguistically salient cues, outperforming both conventional black-box compatible methods and gradient-based approaches that are given oracle access to the black-box model's gradients for a more challenging benchmark. Our code is available at here.

模型解释黑箱分析语言结构强化学习

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