Synthesizing Pareto-Optimal Interpretations for Black-Box Models
This addresses the challenge of interpretability in AI for users needing transparent model decisions, though it is incremental by extending existing methods to a multi-objective framework.
The paper tackles the problem of generating human-understandable interpretations for black-box machine learning models by balancing conflicting objectives like correctness and explainability, resulting in a framework that synthesizes a varied set of Pareto-optimal interpretations, as demonstrated with neural-network classifiers.
We present a new multi-objective optimization approach for synthesizing interpretations that "explain" the behavior of black-box machine learning models. Constructing human-understandable interpretations for black-box models often requires balancing conflicting objectives. A simple interpretation may be easier to understand for humans while being less precise in its predictions vis-a-vis a complex interpretation. Existing methods for synthesizing interpretations use a single objective function and are often optimized for a single class of interpretations. In contrast, we provide a more general and multi-objective synthesis framework that allows users to choose (1) the class of syntactic templates from which an interpretation should be synthesized, and (2) quantitative measures on both the correctness and explainability of an interpretation. For a given black-box, our approach yields a set of Pareto-optimal interpretations with respect to the correctness and explainability measures. We show that the underlying multi-objective optimization problem can be solved via a reduction to quantitative constraint solving, such as weighted maximum satisfiability. To demonstrate the benefits of our approach, we have applied it to synthesize interpretations for black-box neural-network classifiers. Our experiments show that there often exists a rich and varied set of choices for interpretations that are missed by existing approaches.