Robust Infidelity: When Faithfulness Measures on Masked Language Models Are Misleading

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Crothers, Evan, Viktor, Herna, Japkowicz, Nathalie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914818353528832
author Crothers, Evan
Viktor, Herna
Japkowicz, Nathalie
author_facet Crothers, Evan
Viktor, Herna
Japkowicz, Nathalie
contents A common approach to quantifying neural text classifier interpretability is to calculate faithfulness metrics based on iteratively masking salient input tokens and measuring changes in the model prediction. We propose that this property is better described as "sensitivity to iterative masking", and highlight pitfalls in using this measure for comparing text classifier interpretability. We show that iterative masking produces large variation in faithfulness scores between otherwise comparable Transformer encoder text classifiers. We then demonstrate that iteratively masked samples produce embeddings outside the distribution seen during training, resulting in unpredictable behaviour. We further explore task-specific considerations that undermine principled comparison of interpretability using iterative masking, such as an underlying similarity to salience-based adversarial attacks. Our findings give insight into how these behaviours affect neural text classifiers, and provide guidance on how sensitivity to iterative masking should be interpreted.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_06795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Infidelity: When Faithfulness Measures on Masked Language Models Are Misleading
Crothers, Evan
Viktor, Herna
Japkowicz, Nathalie
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
A common approach to quantifying neural text classifier interpretability is to calculate faithfulness metrics based on iteratively masking salient input tokens and measuring changes in the model prediction. We propose that this property is better described as "sensitivity to iterative masking", and highlight pitfalls in using this measure for comparing text classifier interpretability. We show that iterative masking produces large variation in faithfulness scores between otherwise comparable Transformer encoder text classifiers. We then demonstrate that iteratively masked samples produce embeddings outside the distribution seen during training, resulting in unpredictable behaviour. We further explore task-specific considerations that undermine principled comparison of interpretability using iterative masking, such as an underlying similarity to salience-based adversarial attacks. Our findings give insight into how these behaviours affect neural text classifiers, and provide guidance on how sensitivity to iterative masking should be interpreted.
title Robust Infidelity: When Faithfulness Measures on Masked Language Models Are Misleading
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06795