What You Read is What You Classify: Highlighting Attributions to Text and Text-Like Inputs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Berman, Daniel S., Merritt, Brian, Ta, Stanley, Udwin, Dana, Ernlund, Amanda, Ratcliff, Jeremy, Narayan, Vijay
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Berman, Daniel S.
Merritt, Brian
Ta, Stanley
Udwin, Dana
Ernlund, Amanda
Ratcliff, Jeremy
Narayan, Vijay
author_facet Berman, Daniel S.
Merritt, Brian
Ta, Stanley
Udwin, Dana
Ernlund, Amanda
Ratcliff, Jeremy
Narayan, Vijay
contents At present, there are no easily understood explainable artificial intelligence (AI) methods for discrete token inputs, like text. Most explainable AI techniques do not extend well to token sequences, where both local and global features matter, because state-of-the-art models, like transformers, tend to focus on global connections. Therefore, existing explainable AI algorithms fail by (i) identifying disparate tokens of importance, or (ii) assigning a large number of tokens a low value of importance. This method for explainable AI for tokens-based classifiers generalizes a mask-based explainable AI algorithm for images. It starts with an Explainer neural network that is trained to create masks to hide information not relevant for classification. Then, the Hadamard product of the mask and the continuous values of the classifier's embedding layer is taken and passed through the classifier, changing the magnitude of the embedding vector but keeping the orientation unchanged. The Explainer is trained for a taxonomic classifier for nucleotide sequences and it is shown that the masked segments are less relevant to classification than the unmasked ones. This method focused on the importance the token as a whole (i.e., a segment of the input sequence), producing a human-readable explanation.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_24149
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What You Read is What You Classify: Highlighting Attributions to Text and Text-Like Inputs
Berman, Daniel S.
Merritt, Brian
Ta, Stanley
Udwin, Dana
Ernlund, Amanda
Ratcliff, Jeremy
Narayan, Vijay
Machine Learning
Genomics
At present, there are no easily understood explainable artificial intelligence (AI) methods for discrete token inputs, like text. Most explainable AI techniques do not extend well to token sequences, where both local and global features matter, because state-of-the-art models, like transformers, tend to focus on global connections. Therefore, existing explainable AI algorithms fail by (i) identifying disparate tokens of importance, or (ii) assigning a large number of tokens a low value of importance. This method for explainable AI for tokens-based classifiers generalizes a mask-based explainable AI algorithm for images. It starts with an Explainer neural network that is trained to create masks to hide information not relevant for classification. Then, the Hadamard product of the mask and the continuous values of the classifier's embedding layer is taken and passed through the classifier, changing the magnitude of the embedding vector but keeping the orientation unchanged. The Explainer is trained for a taxonomic classifier for nucleotide sequences and it is shown that the masked segments are less relevant to classification than the unmasked ones. This method focused on the importance the token as a whole (i.e., a segment of the input sequence), producing a human-readable explanation.
title What You Read is What You Classify: Highlighting Attributions to Text and Text-Like Inputs
topic Machine Learning
Genomics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24149