用能量模型替代因果图,解释物联网系统中各组件的依赖影响。
From Graphs to Gradients: Physics-Inspired Structural Attribution for Cyber-Physical IoT Systems and Beyond
- 以能量场建模系统变量依赖,避开复杂因果图构建
- 在工业物联网测试中准确识别异常组件,性能优于传统方法
- 适合需要可解释性的高维物理-信息混合系统
人工智能可解释性方法旨在揭示系统行为背后的成因与影响,帮助理解不同输入下的决策逻辑。传统方法多关注输入输出间的相关性,而因果解释则聚焦干预性问题,提供更稳健的洞察,尤其适用于高风险领域。然而,在具有反馈回路和部分可观测性的大规模混合网络系统中,显式恢复有向因果结构往往不切实际。本文提出一种受统计力学启发的新框架,通过无向能量基表示建模物联网系统的变量依赖关系。该方法通过分析能量景观变化来实现依赖感知的归因,无需重建有向因果图,且能支持对混合交互中扰动效应的推理,提供异常行为的可靠解释。我们在包含连续与离散变量的工业物联网测试平台进行仿真验证,结果表明该方法在归因精度、鲁棒性和可扩展性上均优于现有基于图的方法。尽管不试图完全还原系统生成动态,但其归因结果对人类理解及下游预测与诊断任务均有价值。该框架不仅适用于工业物联网安全,也适用于其他需要严谨结构化解释的高维网络系统。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Interpretable explanation methods in Artificial Intelligence aim to uncover the underlying causes and their effects, enabling a deeper understanding of why a system behaves in a certain way under different inputs. Unlike traditional explainability methods, which mainly highlight correlations between input and output variables, causal explanation focuses on interventional questions. By doing so, it provides more robust insights, helping users understand automated decisions, especially in high-risk domains. Recovering an explicit directed causal structure, however, is often impractical in large-scale, hybrid cyber-physical systems with feedback loops and partial observability. This paper introduces a novel framework inspired by statistical mechanics that instead models variable dependencies through an undirected, energy-based representation of cyber-physical IoT systems. Our approach enables rigorous dependency-aware attribution by analysing how variations in the energy landscape reflect the influence of individual components, without recovering a directed causal graph. It also supports reasoning about perturbation effects across hybrid interactions, providing reliable explanations of abnormal behaviours. We empirically examined our framework through simulations on an industrial IoT testbed with hybrid continuous and discrete variables, demonstrating higher attribution accuracy, improved robustness and better scalability than state-of-the-art graph-based approaches. While the attributions are not intended to fully recover the system's generative dynamics, they provide valuable, dependency-aware explanations supporting both human interpretation and downstream predictive and diagnostic tasks. Although demonstrated in industrial IoT security, our framework also applies to other high-dimensional cyber-physical and socio-technical systems requiring principled, structural explanations.
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