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Main Authors: Formica, Federico, Gregis, Stefano, Zanenga, Aurora Francesca, Rota, Andrea, Lawford, Mark, Menghi, Claudio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00052
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author Formica, Federico
Gregis, Stefano
Zanenga, Aurora Francesca
Rota, Andrea
Lawford, Mark
Menghi, Claudio
author_facet Formica, Federico
Gregis, Stefano
Zanenga, Aurora Francesca
Rota, Andrea
Lawford, Mark
Menghi, Claudio
contents Understanding why neural networks make certain decisions is pivotal for their use in safety-critical applications. Feature-Guided Analysis (FGA) extracts slices of neural networks relevant to their tasks. Existing feature-guided approaches typically monitor the activation of the neural network neurons to extract the relevant rules. Preliminary results are encouraging and demonstrate the feasibility of this solution by assessing the precision and recall of Feature-Guided Analysis on two pilot case studies. However, the applicability in industrial contexts needs additional empirical evidence. To mitigate this need, this paper assesses the applicability of FGA on a benchmark made by the MNIST and LSC datasets. We assessed the effectiveness of FGA in computing rules that explain the behavior of the neural network. Our results show that FGA has a higher precision on our benchmark than the results from the literature. We also evaluated how the selection of the neural network architecture, training, and feature selection affect the effectiveness of FGA. Our results show that the selection significantly affects the recall of FGA, while it has a negligible impact on its precision.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_00052
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Feature-Guided Analysis of Neural Networks: A Replication Study
Formica, Federico
Gregis, Stefano
Zanenga, Aurora Francesca
Rota, Andrea
Lawford, Mark
Menghi, Claudio
Machine Learning
Understanding why neural networks make certain decisions is pivotal for their use in safety-critical applications. Feature-Guided Analysis (FGA) extracts slices of neural networks relevant to their tasks. Existing feature-guided approaches typically monitor the activation of the neural network neurons to extract the relevant rules. Preliminary results are encouraging and demonstrate the feasibility of this solution by assessing the precision and recall of Feature-Guided Analysis on two pilot case studies. However, the applicability in industrial contexts needs additional empirical evidence. To mitigate this need, this paper assesses the applicability of FGA on a benchmark made by the MNIST and LSC datasets. We assessed the effectiveness of FGA in computing rules that explain the behavior of the neural network. Our results show that FGA has a higher precision on our benchmark than the results from the literature. We also evaluated how the selection of the neural network architecture, training, and feature selection affect the effectiveness of FGA. Our results show that the selection significantly affects the recall of FGA, while it has a negligible impact on its precision.
title Feature-Guided Analysis of Neural Networks: A Replication Study
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00052