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Main Authors: Lopardo, Gianluigi, Precioso, Frederic, Garreau, Damien
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03485
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author Lopardo, Gianluigi
Precioso, Frederic
Garreau, Damien
author_facet Lopardo, Gianluigi
Precioso, Frederic
Garreau, Damien
contents Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism intrinsically provides meaningful insights on the internal behavior of the model. Can these insights be used as explanations? Debate rages on. In this paper, we mathematically study a simple attention-based architecture and pinpoint the differences between post-hoc and attention-based explanations. We show that they provide quite different results, and that, despite their limitations, post-hoc methods are capable of capturing more useful insights than merely examining the attention weights.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03485
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Attention Meets Post-hoc Interpretability: A Mathematical Perspective
Lopardo, Gianluigi
Precioso, Frederic
Garreau, Damien
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism intrinsically provides meaningful insights on the internal behavior of the model. Can these insights be used as explanations? Debate rages on. In this paper, we mathematically study a simple attention-based architecture and pinpoint the differences between post-hoc and attention-based explanations. We show that they provide quite different results, and that, despite their limitations, post-hoc methods are capable of capturing more useful insights than merely examining the attention weights.
title Attention Meets Post-hoc Interpretability: A Mathematical Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03485