Towards Modeling Uncertainties of Self-explaining Neural Networks via Conformal Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qian, Wei, Zhao, Chenxu, Li, Yangyi, Ma, Fenglong, Zhang, Chao, Huai, Mengdi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Qian, Wei
Zhao, Chenxu
Li, Yangyi
Ma, Fenglong
Zhang, Chao
Huai, Mengdi
author_facet Qian, Wei
Zhao, Chenxu
Li, Yangyi
Ma, Fenglong
Zhang, Chao
Huai, Mengdi
contents Despite the recent progress in deep neural networks (DNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by DNNs. Existing explanation methods for DNNs mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations. The fact that post-hoc methods can fail to reveal the actual original reasoning process of DNNs raises the need to build DNNs with built-in interpretability. Motivated by this, many self-explaining neural networks have been proposed to generate not only accurate predictions but also clear and intuitive insights into why a particular decision was made. However, existing self-explaining networks are limited in providing distribution-free uncertainty quantification for the two simultaneously generated prediction outcomes (i.e., a sample's final prediction and its corresponding explanations for interpreting that prediction). Importantly, they also fail to establish a connection between the confidence values assigned to the generated explanations in the interpretation layer and those allocated to the final predictions in the ultimate prediction layer. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we design a novel uncertainty modeling framework for self-explaining networks, which not only demonstrates strong distribution-free uncertainty modeling performance for the generated explanations in the interpretation layer but also excels in producing efficient and effective prediction sets for the final predictions based on the informative high-level basis explanations. We perform the theoretical analysis for the proposed framework. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_01549
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Modeling Uncertainties of Self-explaining Neural Networks via Conformal Prediction
Qian, Wei
Zhao, Chenxu
Li, Yangyi
Ma, Fenglong
Zhang, Chao
Huai, Mengdi
Machine Learning
Despite the recent progress in deep neural networks (DNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by DNNs. Existing explanation methods for DNNs mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations. The fact that post-hoc methods can fail to reveal the actual original reasoning process of DNNs raises the need to build DNNs with built-in interpretability. Motivated by this, many self-explaining neural networks have been proposed to generate not only accurate predictions but also clear and intuitive insights into why a particular decision was made. However, existing self-explaining networks are limited in providing distribution-free uncertainty quantification for the two simultaneously generated prediction outcomes (i.e., a sample's final prediction and its corresponding explanations for interpreting that prediction). Importantly, they also fail to establish a connection between the confidence values assigned to the generated explanations in the interpretation layer and those allocated to the final predictions in the ultimate prediction layer. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we design a novel uncertainty modeling framework for self-explaining networks, which not only demonstrates strong distribution-free uncertainty modeling performance for the generated explanations in the interpretation layer but also excels in producing efficient and effective prediction sets for the final predictions based on the informative high-level basis explanations. We perform the theoretical analysis for the proposed framework. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty framework.
title Towards Modeling Uncertainties of Self-explaining Neural Networks via Conformal Prediction
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01549