Auditing Local Explanations is Hard

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bhattacharjee, Robi, von Luxburg, Ulrike
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Bhattacharjee, Robi
von Luxburg, Ulrike
author_facet Bhattacharjee, Robi
von Luxburg, Ulrike
contents In sensitive contexts, providers of machine learning algorithms are increasingly required to give explanations for their algorithms' decisions. However, explanation receivers might not trust the provider, who potentially could output misleading or manipulated explanations. In this work, we investigate an auditing framework in which a third-party auditor or a collective of users attempts to sanity-check explanations: they can query model decisions and the corresponding local explanations, pool all the information received, and then check for basic consistency properties. We prove upper and lower bounds on the amount of queries that are needed for an auditor to succeed within this framework. Our results show that successful auditing requires a potentially exorbitant number of queries -- particularly in high dimensional cases. Our analysis also reveals that a key property is the ``locality'' of the provided explanations -- a quantity that so far has not been paid much attention to in the explainability literature. Looking forward, our results suggest that for complex high-dimensional settings, merely providing a pointwise prediction and explanation could be insufficient, as there is no way for the users to verify that the provided explanations are not completely made-up.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_13281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Auditing Local Explanations is Hard
Bhattacharjee, Robi
von Luxburg, Ulrike
Machine Learning
In sensitive contexts, providers of machine learning algorithms are increasingly required to give explanations for their algorithms' decisions. However, explanation receivers might not trust the provider, who potentially could output misleading or manipulated explanations. In this work, we investigate an auditing framework in which a third-party auditor or a collective of users attempts to sanity-check explanations: they can query model decisions and the corresponding local explanations, pool all the information received, and then check for basic consistency properties. We prove upper and lower bounds on the amount of queries that are needed for an auditor to succeed within this framework. Our results show that successful auditing requires a potentially exorbitant number of queries -- particularly in high dimensional cases. Our analysis also reveals that a key property is the ``locality'' of the provided explanations -- a quantity that so far has not been paid much attention to in the explainability literature. Looking forward, our results suggest that for complex high-dimensional settings, merely providing a pointwise prediction and explanation could be insufficient, as there is no way for the users to verify that the provided explanations are not completely made-up.
title Auditing Local Explanations is Hard
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13281