Locally Explaining Prediction Behavior via Gradual Interventions and Measuring Property Gradients

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Penzel, Niklas, Denzler, Joachim
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Penzel, Niklas
Denzler, Joachim
author_facet Penzel, Niklas
Denzler, Joachim
contents Deep learning models achieve high predictive performance but lack intrinsic interpretability, hindering our understanding of the learned prediction behavior. Existing local explainability methods focus on associations, neglecting the causal drivers of model predictions. Other approaches adopt a causal perspective but primarily provide global, model-level explanations. However, for specific inputs, it's unclear whether globally identified factors apply locally. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework for local interventional explanations by leveraging recent advances in image-to-image editing models. Our approach performs gradual interventions on semantic properties to quantify the corresponding impact on a model's predictions using a novel score, the expected property gradient magnitude. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through an extensive empirical evaluation on a wide range of architectures and tasks. First, we validate it in a synthetic scenario and demonstrate its ability to locally identify biases. Afterward, we apply our approach to investigate medical skin lesion classifiers, analyze network training dynamics, and study a pre-trained CLIP model with real-life interventional data. Our results highlight the potential of interventional explanations on the property level to reveal new insights into the behavior of deep models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05424
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Locally Explaining Prediction Behavior via Gradual Interventions and Measuring Property Gradients
Penzel, Niklas
Denzler, Joachim
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep learning models achieve high predictive performance but lack intrinsic interpretability, hindering our understanding of the learned prediction behavior. Existing local explainability methods focus on associations, neglecting the causal drivers of model predictions. Other approaches adopt a causal perspective but primarily provide global, model-level explanations. However, for specific inputs, it's unclear whether globally identified factors apply locally. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework for local interventional explanations by leveraging recent advances in image-to-image editing models. Our approach performs gradual interventions on semantic properties to quantify the corresponding impact on a model's predictions using a novel score, the expected property gradient magnitude. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through an extensive empirical evaluation on a wide range of architectures and tasks. First, we validate it in a synthetic scenario and demonstrate its ability to locally identify biases. Afterward, we apply our approach to investigate medical skin lesion classifiers, analyze network training dynamics, and study a pre-trained CLIP model with real-life interventional data. Our results highlight the potential of interventional explanations on the property level to reveal new insights into the behavior of deep models.
title Locally Explaining Prediction Behavior via Gradual Interventions and Measuring Property Gradients
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05424