No Arabic abstract
As machine learning algorithms getting adopted in an ever-increasing number of applications, interpretation has emerged as a crucial desideratum. In this paper, we propose a mathematical definition for the human-interpretable model. In particular, we define interpretability between two information process systems. If a prediction model is interpretable by a human recognition system based on the above interpretability definition, the prediction model is defined as a completely human-interpretable model. We further design a practical framework to train a completely human-interpretable model by user interactions. Experiments on image datasets show the advantages of our proposed model in two aspects: 1) The completely human-interpretable model can provide an entire decision-making process that is human-understandable; 2) The completely human-interpretable model is more robust against adversarial attacks.
Machine learning models that first learn a representation of a domain in terms of human-understandable concepts, then use it to make predictions, have been proposed to facilitate interpretation and interaction with models trained on high-dimensional data. However these methods have important limitations: the way they define concepts are not inherently interpretable, and they assume that concept labels either exist for individual instances or can easily be acquired from users. These limitations are particularly acute for high-dimensional tabular features. We propose an approach for learning a set of transparent concept definitions in high-dimensional tabular data that relies on users labeling concept features instead of individual instances. Our method produces concepts that both align with users intuitive sense of what a concept means, and facilitate prediction of the downstream label by a transparent machine learning model. This ensures that the full model is transparent and intuitive, and as predictive as possible given this constraint. We demonstrate with simulated user feedback on real prediction problems, including one in a clinical domain, that this kind of direct feedback is much more efficient at learning solutions that align with ground truth concept definitions than alternative transparent approaches that rely on labeling instances or other existing interaction mechanisms, while maintaining similar predictive performance.
Deep neural networks have been well-known for their superb performance in handling various machine learning and artificial intelligence tasks. However, due to their over-parameterized black-box nature, it is often difficult to understand the prediction results of deep models. In recent years, many interpretation tools have been proposed to explain or reveal the ways that deep models make decisions. In this paper, we review this line of research and try to make a comprehensive survey. Specifically, we introduce and clarify two basic concepts-interpretations and interpretability-that people usually get confused. First of all, to address the research efforts in interpretations, we elaborate the design of several recent interpretation algorithms, from different perspectives, through proposing a new taxonomy. Then, to understand the results of interpretation, we also survey the performance metrics for evaluating interpretation algorithms. Further, we summarize the existing work in evaluating models interpretability using trustworthy interpretation algorithms. Finally, we review and discuss the connections between deep models interpretations and other factors, such as adversarial robustness and data augmentations, and we introduce several open-source libraries for interpretation algorithms and evaluation approaches.
Many risk-sensitive applications require Machine Learning (ML) models to be interpretable. Attempts to obtain interpretable models typically rely on tuning, by trial-and-error, hyper-parameters of model complexity that are only loosely related to interpretability. We show that it is instead possible to take a meta-learning approach: an ML model of non-trivial Proxies of Human Interpretability (PHIs) can be learned from human feedback, then this model can be incorporated within an ML training process to directly optimize for interpretability. We show this for evolutionary symbolic regression. We first design and distribute a survey finalized at finding a link between features of mathematical formulas and two established PHIs, simulatability and decomposability. Next, we use the resulting dataset to learn an ML model of interpretability. Lastly, we query this model to estimate the interpretability of evolving solutions within bi-objective genetic programming. We perform experiments on five synthetic and eight real-world symbolic regression problems, comparing to the traditional use of solution size minimization. The results show that the use of our model leads to formulas that are, for a same level of accuracy-interpretability trade-off, either significantly more or equally accurate. Moreover, the formulas are also arguably more interpretable. Given the very positive results, we believe that our approach represents an important stepping stone for the design of next-generation interpretable (evolutionary) ML algorithms.
Providing explanations for deep neural networks (DNNs) is essential for their use in domains wherein the interpretability of decisions is a critical prerequisite. Despite the plethora of work on interpreting DNNs, most existing solutions offer interpretability in an ad hoc, one-shot, and static manner, without accounting for the perception, understanding, or response of end-users, resulting in their poor usability in practice. In this paper, we argue that DNN interpretability should be implemented as the interactions between users and models. We present i-Algebra, a first-of-its-kind interactive framework for interpreting DNNs. At its core is a library of atomic, composable operators, which explain model behaviors at varying input granularity, during different inference stages, and from distinct interpretation perspectives. Leveraging a declarative query language, users are enabled to build various analysis tools (e.g., drill-down, comparative, what-if analysis) via flexibly composing such operators. We prototype i-Algebra and conduct user studies in a set of representative analysis tasks, including inspecting adversarial inputs, resolving model inconsistency, and cleansing contaminated data, all demonstrating its promising usability.
Machine learning has shown much promise in helping improve the quality of medical, legal, and economic decision-making. In these applications, machine learning models must satisfy two important criteria: (i) they must be causal, since the goal is typically to predict individual treatment effects, and (ii) they must be interpretable, so that human decision makers can validate and trust the model predictions. There has recently been much progress along each direction independently, yet the state-of-the-art approaches are fundamentally incompatible. We propose a framework for learning causal interpretable models---from observational data---that can be used to predict individual treatment effects. Our framework can be used with any algorithm for learning interpretable models. Furthermore, we prove an error bound on the treatment effects predicted by our model. Finally, in an experiment on real-world data, we show that the models trained using our framework significantly outperform a number of baselines.