The Solvability of Interpretability Evaluation Metrics

Yilun Zhou, Julie Shah


Abstract
Feature attribution methods are popular for explaining neural network predictions, and they are often evaluated on metrics such as comprehensiveness and sufficiency. In this paper, we highlight an intriguing property of these metrics: their solvability. Concretely, we can define the problem of optimizing an explanation for a metric, which can be solved by beam search. This observation leads to the obvious yet unaddressed question: why do we use explainers (e.g., LIME) not based on solving the target metric, if the metric value represents explanation quality? We present a series of investigations showing strong performance of this beam search explainer and discuss its broader implication: a definition-evaluation duality of interpretability concepts. We implement the explainer and release the Python solvex package for models of text, image and tabular domains.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.182
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2399–2415
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.182
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.182
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yilun Zhou and Julie Shah. 2023. The Solvability of Interpretability Evaluation Metrics. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 2399–2415, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Solvability of Interpretability Evaluation Metrics (Zhou & Shah, Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.182.pdf