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Main Authors: Dixit, Shrey, Fakhar, Kayson, Hadaeghi, Fatemeh, Mineault, Patrick, Kording, Konrad P., Hilgetag, Claus C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732
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author Dixit, Shrey
Fakhar, Kayson
Hadaeghi, Fatemeh
Mineault, Patrick
Kording, Konrad P.
Hilgetag, Claus C.
author_facet Dixit, Shrey
Fakhar, Kayson
Hadaeghi, Fatemeh
Mineault, Patrick
Kording, Konrad P.
Hilgetag, Claus C.
contents Neural networks now generate text, images, and speech with billions of parameters, producing a need to know how each neural unit contributes to these high-dimensional outputs. Existing explainable-AI methods, such as SHAP, attribute importance to inputs, but cannot quantify the contributions of neural units across thousands of output pixels, tokens, or logits. Here we close that gap with Multiperturbation Shapley-value Analysis (MSA), a model-agnostic game-theoretic framework. By systematically lesioning combinations of units, MSA yields Shapley Modes, unit-wise contribution maps that share the exact dimensionality of the model's output. We apply MSA across scales, from multi-layer perceptrons to the 56-billion-parameter Mixtral-8x7B and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The approach demonstrates how regularisation concentrates computation in a few hubs, exposes language-specific experts inside the LLM, and reveals an inverted pixel-generation hierarchy in GANs. Together, these results showcase MSA as a powerful approach for interpreting, editing, and compressing deep neural networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19732
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Game-Theoretic Attribution of Function of Neural Units
Dixit, Shrey
Fakhar, Kayson
Hadaeghi, Fatemeh
Mineault, Patrick
Kording, Konrad P.
Hilgetag, Claus C.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural networks now generate text, images, and speech with billions of parameters, producing a need to know how each neural unit contributes to these high-dimensional outputs. Existing explainable-AI methods, such as SHAP, attribute importance to inputs, but cannot quantify the contributions of neural units across thousands of output pixels, tokens, or logits. Here we close that gap with Multiperturbation Shapley-value Analysis (MSA), a model-agnostic game-theoretic framework. By systematically lesioning combinations of units, MSA yields Shapley Modes, unit-wise contribution maps that share the exact dimensionality of the model's output. We apply MSA across scales, from multi-layer perceptrons to the 56-billion-parameter Mixtral-8x7B and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The approach demonstrates how regularisation concentrates computation in a few hubs, exposes language-specific experts inside the LLM, and reveals an inverted pixel-generation hierarchy in GANs. Together, these results showcase MSA as a powerful approach for interpreting, editing, and compressing deep neural networks.
title Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Game-Theoretic Attribution of Function of Neural Units
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732