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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bergamin, Luca, Confalonieri, Roberto, Aiolli, Fabio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22384
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author Bergamin, Luca
Confalonieri, Roberto
Aiolli, Fabio
author_facet Bergamin, Luca
Confalonieri, Roberto
Aiolli, Fabio
contents Deep neural networks are widely used in practical applications of AI, however, their inner structure and complexity made them generally not easily interpretable. Model transparency and interpretability are key requirements for multiple scenarios where high performance is not enough to adopt the proposed solution. In this work, a differentiable approximation of $L_0$ regularization is adapted into a logic-based neural network, the Multi-layer Logical Perceptron (MLLP), to study its efficacy in reducing the complexity of its discrete interpretable version, the Concept Rule Set (CRS), while retaining its performance. The results are compared to alternative heuristics like Random Binarization of the network weights, to determine if better results can be achieved when using a less-noisy technique that sparsifies the network based on the loss function instead of a random distribution. The trade-off between the CRS complexity and its performance is discussed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle (Sometimes) Less is More: Mitigating the Complexity of Rule-based Representation for Interpretable Classification
Bergamin, Luca
Confalonieri, Roberto
Aiolli, Fabio
Machine Learning
Deep neural networks are widely used in practical applications of AI, however, their inner structure and complexity made them generally not easily interpretable. Model transparency and interpretability are key requirements for multiple scenarios where high performance is not enough to adopt the proposed solution. In this work, a differentiable approximation of $L_0$ regularization is adapted into a logic-based neural network, the Multi-layer Logical Perceptron (MLLP), to study its efficacy in reducing the complexity of its discrete interpretable version, the Concept Rule Set (CRS), while retaining its performance. The results are compared to alternative heuristics like Random Binarization of the network weights, to determine if better results can be achieved when using a less-noisy technique that sparsifies the network based on the loss function instead of a random distribution. The trade-off between the CRS complexity and its performance is discussed.
title (Sometimes) Less is More: Mitigating the Complexity of Rule-based Representation for Interpretable Classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22384