Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster
in
Workshop: Actionable Interpretability

Sum-of-Parts: Self-Attributing Neural Networks with End-to-End Learning of Feature Groups

Weiqiu You · Helen Qu · Marco Gatti · Bhuvnesh Jain · Eric Wong

[ ] [ Project Page ]
Sat 19 Jul 1 p.m. PDT — 2 p.m. PDT

Abstract:

Self-attributing neural networks (SANNs) present a potential path towards interpretable models for high-dimensional problems, but often face significant trade-offs in performance. In this work, we formally prove a lower bound on errors of per-feature SANNs, whereas group-based SANNs can achieve zero error and thus high performance. Motivated by these insights, we propose Sum-of-Parts (SOP), a framework that transforms any differentiable model into a group-based SANN, where feature groups are learned end-to-end without group supervision. SOP achieves state-of-the-art performance for SANNs on vision and language tasks, and we validate that the groups are interpretable on a range of quantitative and semantic metrics. We further validate the utility of SOP explanations in model debugging and cosmological scientific discovery.

Chat is not available.