Accelerating Anchors via Specialization and Feature Transformation
This work addresses a bottleneck for users of model-agnostic explanations in time-sensitive applications, though it is incremental as it builds directly on the existing Anchors method.
The paper tackles the computational inefficiency of the Anchors explanation technique by proposing a pre-training-based approach with rule transformations, reducing explanation generation time while maintaining fidelity and interpretability across tabular, text, and image datasets.
Anchors is a popular local model-agnostic explanation technique whose applicability is limited by its computational inefficiency. To address this limitation, we propose a pre-training-based approach to accelerate Anchors without compromising the explanation quality. Our approach leverages the iterative nature of Anchors' algorithm which gradually refines an explanation until it is precise enough for a given input by providing a general explanation that is obtained through pre-training as Anchors' initial explanation. Specifically, we develop a two-step rule transformation process: the horizontal transformation adapts a pre-trained explanation to the current input by replacing features, and the vertical transformation refines the general explanation until it is precise enough for the input. We evaluate our method across tabular, text, and image datasets, demonstrating that it significantly reduces explanation generation time while maintaining fidelity and interpretability, thereby enabling the practical adoption of Anchors in time-sensitive applications.