Learning to Explain: Generating Stable Explanations Fast

Xuelin Situ, Ingrid Zukerman, Cecile Paris, Sameen Maruf, Gholamreza Haffari


Abstract
The importance of explaining the outcome of a machine learning model, especially a black-box model, is widely acknowledged. Recent approaches explain an outcome by identifying the contributions of input features to this outcome. In environments involving large black-box models or complex inputs, this leads to computationally demanding algorithms. Further, these algorithms often suffer from low stability, with explanations varying significantly across similar examples. In this paper, we propose a Learning to Explain (L2E) approach that learns the behaviour of an underlying explanation algorithm simultaneously from all training examples. Once the explanation algorithm is distilled into an explainer network, it can be used to explain new instances. Our experiments on three classification tasks, which compare our approach to six explanation algorithms, show that L2E is between 5 and 7.5×10ˆ4 times faster than these algorithms, while generating more stable explanations, and having comparable faithfulness to the black-box model.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.415
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5340–5355
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.415
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.415
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuelin Situ, Ingrid Zukerman, Cecile Paris, Sameen Maruf, and Gholamreza Haffari. 2021. Learning to Explain: Generating Stable Explanations Fast. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5340–5355, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Explain: Generating Stable Explanations Fast (Situ et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.415.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.415.mp4
Code
 situsnow/l2e
Data
CoLASST