Explaining, Fast and Slow: Abstraction and Refinement of Provable Explanations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bassan, Shahaf, Elboher, Yizhak Yisrael, Ladner, Tobias, Althoff, Matthias, Katz, Guy
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bassan, Shahaf
Elboher, Yizhak Yisrael
Ladner, Tobias
Althoff, Matthias
Katz, Guy
author_facet Bassan, Shahaf
Elboher, Yizhak Yisrael
Ladner, Tobias
Althoff, Matthias
Katz, Guy
contents Despite significant advancements in post-hoc explainability techniques for neural networks, many current methods rely on heuristics and do not provide formally provable guarantees over the explanations provided. Recent work has shown that it is possible to obtain explanations with formal guarantees by identifying subsets of input features that are sufficient to determine that predictions remain unchanged using neural network verification techniques. Despite the appeal of these explanations, their computation faces significant scalability challenges. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a novel abstraction-refinement technique for efficiently computing provably sufficient explanations of neural network predictions. Our method abstracts the original large neural network by constructing a substantially reduced network, where a sufficient explanation of the reduced network is also provably sufficient for the original network, hence significantly speeding up the verification process. If the explanation is in sufficient on the reduced network, we iteratively refine the network size by gradually increasing it until convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances the efficiency of obtaining provably sufficient explanations for neural network predictions while additionally providing a fine-grained interpretation of the network's predictions across different abstraction levels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explaining, Fast and Slow: Abstraction and Refinement of Provable Explanations
Bassan, Shahaf
Elboher, Yizhak Yisrael
Ladner, Tobias
Althoff, Matthias
Katz, Guy
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Logic in Computer Science
Despite significant advancements in post-hoc explainability techniques for neural networks, many current methods rely on heuristics and do not provide formally provable guarantees over the explanations provided. Recent work has shown that it is possible to obtain explanations with formal guarantees by identifying subsets of input features that are sufficient to determine that predictions remain unchanged using neural network verification techniques. Despite the appeal of these explanations, their computation faces significant scalability challenges. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a novel abstraction-refinement technique for efficiently computing provably sufficient explanations of neural network predictions. Our method abstracts the original large neural network by constructing a substantially reduced network, where a sufficient explanation of the reduced network is also provably sufficient for the original network, hence significantly speeding up the verification process. If the explanation is in sufficient on the reduced network, we iteratively refine the network size by gradually increasing it until convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances the efficiency of obtaining provably sufficient explanations for neural network predictions while additionally providing a fine-grained interpretation of the network's predictions across different abstraction levels.
title Explaining, Fast and Slow: Abstraction and Refinement of Provable Explanations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08505