Alfio Ferrara, Lorenzo Gatta, Sergio Picascia +1cs.SE cs.AI
Feature attribution is a central tool of model interpretability, yet the software through which it is applied remains fragmented: individual tools specialize along narrow axes, such as a single modality, a code API or a GUI, or a fixed rather than extensible method set, and rarely combine these strengths. Moreover, many explainability tools are designed primarily for domain experts, requiring programming skills or familiarity with attribution methods that can make them difficult for non-expert users to access. In this article, we present LumiXAI, a modular full-stack framework that consolidates attribution analysis into a single system. It couples classification and generative attribution with an interactive GUI supporting bidirectional exploration, a plug-in architecture for registering new models and methods, and three access tiers serving non-programmers, developers, and extenders from one backend. Its contribution is a system that operationalises established attribution methods under one interface, one interaction model, and one persistence layer, with containerised services and persistent results making analyses reproducible across machines.
Zhongli Jiang, Min Zhang, Dabao Zhangstat.ML cs.LG
Numerous methods have been developed to quantify feature attributions in individual predictions for tree ensembles. However, many applications require global measures of feature contributions to overall model performance. Although local attribution scores can be aggregated to characterize feature importance, such summaries do not directly decompose measures of predictive performance, such as $R^2$. This article introduces qshap, available in both R and Python, which provides Shapley decomposition of $R^2$ values for gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) to quantify feature-specific contributions to model performance. By decomposing the quadratic loss of individual observations, qshap provides flexible tools to explore the importance of individual features and observations. qshap currently supports widely used GBDT implementations, including xgboost, lightgbm, and catboost, through a unified tree representation and efficient C++ backends. Its modular design can accommodate other GBDT implementations built from binary decision trees. In addition, we introduce a specialized backend for oblivious trees that exploits their symmetric structure to substantially accelerate computation.
Text-to-SQL systems are commonly evaluated using ground-truth SQL queries or reference execution results, but such supervision is unavailable at inference time in real-world deployments. This creates a critical verification problem: given only a user question, database context, and generated SQL, can a system estimate whether the generated query is likely to correctly answer the question? Recent approaches use LLMs as judge or specialized agents to inspect generated SQL, but their decisions can be difficult to trace. Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) address this by learning from execution-labeled candidate SQLs and assigning correctness scores to unseen queries, yet they still provide limited visibility into the signals behind each verification. To address this limitation, we propose TraceSQL, a lightweight and traceable verification model built on explicit diagnostic features. TraceSQL combines 67 features capturing question ambiguity, question requirements, question-schema-SQL consistency, SQL structure, and intent alignment. These signals remain available for examining which factors influence each prediction and for tracing decisions back to diagnostic evidence. On BIRD development databases, TraceSQL achieves 66.47% F1 and 64.48% ROC-AUC, compared with 61.87% F1 and 58.26% ROC-AUC for the GradeSQL-7B ORM baseline on the same generated-SQL evaluation. Feature attribution further shows that the model relies on both semantic grounding and deterministic SQL-structure signals. These results show that SQL verification can be performed with a lightweight learned model while retaining feature-level evidence for inspecting and diagnosing its predictions.
Michael Georgiades, Charalambia Varnavacs.AI cs.LG
Predictive explanation methods attribute a model output; they do not, by themselves, attribute an intervention effect on the real-world outcome. We introduce the Causal Attribution Score (CAS), a compact score architecture for causal explanation. CAS starts from an identified interventional coalition game, allocates the joint intervention contrast with causal Shapley contributions, and converts those raw outcome-scale effects into Local CAS, Signed Local CAS, and two complementary Global CAS summaries. The innovation is not a new Shapley formula, but a local-to-global causal reporting layer with an explicit intervention target. In the known-truth benchmark, eight repeated primary-interaction simulations (n = 2,200 each, three actions) gave mean Local CAS MAE of 0.107 for coalition-aware CAS, compared with 0.173 for one-at-a-time normalisation and 0.213 for a global normalised absolute ATE vector. The paired advantage over one-at-a-time normalisation increased from -0.003 under additivity to 0.091 under strong interactions. On both empirical DoubleML datasets, 401(k) eligibility/net financial assets (n = 9,915) and Pennsylvania reemployment bonus/unemployment duration (n = 5,099), predictive SHAP/TreeSHAP rankings differed materially from Feature-CAS rankings of treatment-effect modifiers. In Pennsylvania, dep1 (exactly one dependent) moved from predictive global rank 13 to Feature-CAS rank 2 and was the leading local Feature-CAS modifier. These results isolate the added value of separating what predicts the outcome from what explains heterogeneity in an estimated causal effect.
Benjamin Formby, Kuang-Ching Wang, D Hudson Smithcs.CV
We present a novel causal approach to interpretability for computer vision models that dynamically masks the input image prior to classification. The interpretability of deep learning predictions is critical in high-stakes fields such as medical imaging, security, and autonomous driving. Most interpretability methods are applied passively to already trained models, which typically result in correlational rather than causal explanations. Existing causal interpretability methods are limited to post hoc analysis, weakening the causal claims. Additionally, existing active methods generally lack explanations that explicitly assign responsibility to input features. This work proposes a spatial attention noise masking framework that provides causal explanations about the features sufficient for the prediction. The proposed framework consists of: 1) a UNet-style mask generator, and 2) a Resnet18 encoder and linear classifier that classifies both masked and unmasked versions of an input image. The generated masks are regularized to be sparse and spatially smooth, while masked image embeddings are constrained to remain consistent with embeddings from the corresponding unmasked images. The resulting masks can be interpreted as feature attribution maps that are competitive with related interpretability methods while additionally providing strong causal explanations of model predictions. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate mask faithfulness, near-baseline classification performance across five classification tasks despite substantial masking of image information, and robustness to distribution shifts such as background swapping and natural adversarial examples. Qualitative comparisons further demonstrate mask behavior and competitive interpretability relative to state-of-the-art feature attribution methods.
Seungeun Lee, Joao Fonseca, Julia Stoyanovichcs.LG
Machine learning pipelines commonly flatten relational data into single-table representations, discarding structural constraints. Widely used Shapley value-based feature attributions then rely on feature independence, evaluating the model on combinations that could never arise in the underlying data, producing misleading explanations. We propose RelShap, a framework that incorporates relational constraints and data provenance into Shapley value computation, restricting both background data and coalition evaluation to relationally valid configurations. The framework is estimator-agnostic and composes with Kernel SHAP, Monte Carlo, and Leverage SHAP without altering their sampling or weighting properties. Functional dependencies further induce equivalence classes over feature coalitions, which RelShap exploits to reduce runtime without changing Shapley values; we provide a combinatorial characterization of the expected speedup. Experiments across multiple datasets, models, and estimators show that RelShap produces explanations that are more faithful to the data-generating process, correctly identifying the dominant feature in controlled settings where existing methods, including Conditional SHAP and ManifoldShap, do not. Our code is available at: https://github.com/duneag2/relshap.
Despite its many benefits, widespread access to individuals' personal data also causes severe privacy concerns for consumers, companies, and policymakers. This study proposes a novel framework that adapts the Shapley-value-based feature attribution approach to the problem domain of data privacy by capturing the two crucial dimensions of data privacy---disclosure risk and data utility. Our proposed framework takes a holistic view of data masking through a fair feature attribution approach based on Shapley values. Different from the existing literature that mostly focuses on the risk-utility tradeoff at the dataset level, the proposed framework addresses the tradeoff at the feature level. Furthermore, the proposed framework is agnostic to data masking methods, statistical and machine learning methods, and data utility and disclosure risk evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively reduce disclosure risk while preserving data utility.
Concept-based explanations are a prevalent way to explain the decisions of complex black-box methods through semantically meaningful, human-interpretable concepts. To attribute the contribution of such concepts to a model's decisions, feature attribution methods are used to quantify how strongly each concept contributes to a model output. These attributions are typically computed for a single output class and therefore answer a non-contrastive "why P?" question. In many situations, however, such as cases of misclassification, class confusion, and low-margin predictions, the more natural question to ask is "why P rather than Q?". We introduce contrastive concept importance (CCI), which attributes the logit margin between a target class and a contrast, or foil, class to concepts in an automatically extracted visual concept basis. The resulting scores are signed, indicating whether a concept supports the target over the foil or the foil over the target, and can be decomposed into target-logit and foil-logit effects. This makes it possible to distinguish globally important concepts from concepts that specifically influence a class-pair distinction, including whether their effect is shared, one-sided, or directly contrastive. We evaluate the method on ImageNet class pairs using CRAFT-style concept bases, insertion and deletion curves, logit-wise decomposition analysis, and semantic class hierarchy. The results show that contrastive concept importance reveals class-pair-specific model behavior that is not captured by ordinary concept importance alone, and that highly contrastive concepts can be evaluated against semantic superclass structure to assess whether they affect fine-grained distinctions rather than broad category evidence.
Lucas Greff Meneses, Evandro S. Ortigossa, Claudio Silva +1cs.LG cs.HC
Dimensionality Reduction (DR) is a fundamental tool for high-dimensional data exploration, reducing the complexity of latent spaces of machine learning models, and assisting in the explanation of complex opaque models. However, non-linear DR techniques often function as opaque transformations themselves, making it challenging to understand how individual features influence instance positioning in the reduced space. This lack of transparency complicates the analysis and interpretation of structural patterns, hindering the ability to reason about the organization of high-dimensional data based on the projected layout. In order to address this challenge, dimensionality reduction explanation methods have shown promise in improving the understanding of the observed groups and cluster structures. Unfortunately, existing DR explanation approaches tend to suffer from limitations such as multiple attributions per feature and restricted applicability to specific dimensionality reduction methods, which hinder their use. In this work, we propose FADEx, a novel local per-instance feature attribution method that leverages local linear approximation via first-order Taylor expansion and Singular Value Decomposition to provide explanations. FADEx computes the local linear models via weighted least squares, eliminating the need for out-of-sample data mapping, making it agnostic to the DR method, while simultaneously providing local feature attributions and distortion analysis. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, comparisons with existing methods, and case studies, we demonstrate FADEx's effectiveness and versatility in providing explanations and analytical resources for analyzing the behavior of DR methods. The results indicate FADEx yields robust and reliable explanations, outperforming existing approaches in several aspects.
Feature-attribution methods assign scores relating input variables to a model's output, but do not by themselves characterize how explicitly defined interaction operators compose across its intermediate layers. We introduce \emph{interior interpretability}, a propagation-based perspective on internal model organization, and instantiate it for tabular Transformers using attention rollout. We interpret rollout as a row-stochastic operator encoding attention-mediated propagation between feature tokens. By applying classical Doeblin--Dobrushin contraction theory, we show that a rollout operator with a small Dobrushin coefficient is quantitatively close to a rank-one stochastic matrix whose common row is determined by its normalized column sums. This result gives a structural interpretation to the corresponding rollout propagation profile. In Transformers trained for metabolomic age prediction, the measured rollout contraction strengthens with depth. Trained and randomly initialized models also exhibit different propagation profiles, although the present experiments do not establish the predictive relevance of individual rollout-ranked variables. Exploratory comparisons with PCA and GradientExplainer approximations to SHAP reveal localized agreement among highly ranked variables but weak agreement across complete rankings. Attention rollout is therefore used here as a diagnostic of attention-mediated propagation, not as a causal explanation or faithful attribution of the complete Transformer.
We investigate the extent to which totally positive matrices can be distinguished through the highest-order coefficients of their characteristic polynomials. To identify the most informative coefficients, we also employed neural-network classifiers together with feature-attribution methods. Using datasets built from several structured totally positive families, including products of positive bidiagonal matrices, Vandermonde matrices, and Cauchy matrices, we find that the coefficients (a_{n-1}, a_{n-2}, a_{n-3}) already contain strong discriminatory information for separating totally positive from non-totally positive matrices in dimensions 5, 10, and 30. The resulting separation is markedly nonlinear and admits a natural geometric description in the corresponding three-dimensional coefficient space by means of Mahalanobis ellipsoids. These ellipsoids enclose the totally positive samples while excluding most non-totally positive ones. Moreover, different structured totally positive families exhibit distinct ellipsoidal signatures, and the separation between these signatures increases with the dimension. These observations lead us to formulate a conjecture on the geometric separation of structured totally positive families in the space determined by the three highest-order characteristic coefficients.
Kseniya Sahatova, Rafael Seidi Oyamada, Xuefei Lu +1cs.LG cs.AI
Predictive process monitoring supports the optimization and control of operational business processes by forecasting the future state or outcome of ongoing cases. While deep neural networks have achieved strong performance for these tasks by modeling sequential dependencies in event logs, their black-box nature limits trust and practical adoption. Feature attribution methods are often used to address this, but applying them directly poses a dilemma: event-level attributions impose high computational complexity for long traces, while explanations based on aggregated trace representations often fail to capture the underlying control-flow dynamics. To address this issue, we propose a local post-hoc explainability method for deep neural networks in outcome prediction. The method relies on a control-flow-aware segmentation algorithm that partitions a trace into meaningful segments and supports the computation of segment-level SHAP explanations. This makes it possible to identify which parts of a trace influence a prediction and which change points steer the case toward the predicted outcome. We assess the proposed segmentation method on a synthetic dataset with known process logic, where meaningful change points can be explicitly verified, and we demonstrate its usefulness on real-world event logs from a loan application process and an administrative process of a Dutch municipality.
Konstantinos Ziliaskopoulos, Alexander Vinel, Alice E. Smithcs.LG math.OC stat.ML
Predictive models are increasingly embedded in operational decision-making, yet standard explanation methods typically explain forecasts rather than the decisions those forecasts induce. This distinction is important in predict-then-optimize systems: large forecast changes may leave the optimizer's action unchanged, while small changes can alter the selected decision and its realized value. We propose Decision Value Attribution (DVA), a Shapley-based framework for attributing the value of a fixed prediction--optimization pipeline. The framework defines cooperative games whose payoff is the downstream decision value, allowing the players to be information sources, optimization or design parameters, or both. We present three variants: InfoDVA attributes value to features, DesignDVA attributes value to operational configurations, and Decision-Value Interactions (DVI) quantifies how information and design jointly create value. We further distinguish post-DVA, which evaluates decisions using realized outcomes, from pre-DVA, which evaluates decisions under the model's full prediction. This separation turns attribution into a decision-level diagnostic of whether the model's operational beliefs align with realized performance. The resulting attributions are expressed in the units of the operational objective and decompose the gain or loss relative to a baseline. Case studies in electricity storage arbitrage and emergency medical service coverage show that predictive explanations can be poor proxies for operational value, that DVA can guide targeted information-control interventions, and that optimization configurations determine when predictive information is decision-relevant.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a useful tool for extracting interpretable features in language models. However, standard SAE architectures operate on individual token activations, meaning that the number of active features scales linearly with context length, and studying long model transcripts becomes difficult. We introduce turn-averaged SAEs, which represent a single Human or Assistant turn with a fixed number of features by learning to reconstruct the average model activation across the turn. We find that turn-averaged features describe a single turn's high-level characteristics more completely than per-token features when judged by an LLM. We also demonstrate that turn-averaged SAEs greatly simplify common downstream uses of SAEs like attribution graphs. Broadly, turn-averaged SAEs make interpretability techniques practical at long context lengths.
Ezequiel Companeetz, Santiago Cifuentes, Sergio Abriolacs.AI
We address the problem of explainability in machine learning models through feature attribution methods. In particular, we consider a variant of Shapley values known as Asymmetric Shapley Values (ASV), which enables the incorporation of causal knowledge into model-agnostic explanations through the use of a causal graph. We show that in certain contexts in which the computation of SHAP is $\#P$-hard, the exact computation of ASV can be done in polynomial time. To extend this algorithmic result, we introduce a notion of equivalence classes over the topological orderings of the underlying causal graph, which is useful to reduce the time to compute ASV. In particular, we present a polynomial-time algorithm (in the number of equivalence classes) to compute it whenever the causal graph is a rooted directed tree. Finally, we develop an algorithm for approximating ASV in arbitrary causal DAGs which relies on a procedure to sample topological orderings uniformly at random. To implement this sampling mechanism we leverage known algorithms as well as simpler alternatives. Our experimental results demonstrate the practical viability of the proposed approach in realistic causal structures.
Soyeon Kim, Kyowoon Lee, Jaesik Choics.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Path-based attribution methods such as Integrated Gradients (IG) are widely adopted for their strong axiomatic properties and effectiveness in attributing model predictions to input features by integrating gradients along a path from a baseline to the input. However, the choice of the attribution path largely affects the quality of explanations, and existing approaches rely on fixed or hand-crafted paths that often produce noisy or distorted attributions. To address this limitation, we propose Diffusion Integrated Gradients (DiffIG), a novel method that reformulates path generation as a conditional generative modeling problem. DiffIG first trains a diffusion model to learn a distribution over paths generated from a Stick-Breaking Process, then employs guided sampling to embed user guidance during the sampling procedure. We demonstrate that DiffIG quantitatively matches or outperforms existing path-based methods, achieving perceptually aligned explanations. This work introduces a new generative perspective for flexible, inference-time controllable Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods.
Modern data analysis usually gives a prediction without showing whether the evidence behind it is clear, conflicting, or stable. Two cases can have the same fitted confidence even when one has mostly agreeing evidence and the other has strong support and strong opposition. We propose Signed Evidence Flow (SEF), which combines a fitted prediction rule with signed feature attributions to measure support, opposition, conflict, and perturbation stability. We prove that confidence determines conflict exactly when it also determines total evidence mass, derive the remaining conditional variance, and state when conflict can improve loss prediction beyond confidence and other audit variables. We also connect conflict to geometric decision fragility. Across healthcare, Covertype, black-box, finance, and ten external data sets, conflict sometimes separates risk among predictions that already appear confident. Cross-fitted tests show added error-ranking information beyond confidence and attribution entropy on several data sets, including two large finance tasks. The direction is not universal: in some tasks, lowconflict cases are riskier. We therefore introduce ScopeGate, a held-out permutation diagnostic that checks the direction before SEF is used for review triage. SEF is consequently an audit tool rather than a universal risk score: it describes evidence structure, while an independent calibration sample determines whether that structure is useful in the target population.
Shapley value-based feature attribution methods face challenges in scenarios involving complex feature interactions and causal relationships, even when a causal structure is provided. Existing methods typically adopt a node-centric view, attributing importance solely to individual features. Consequently, they often fail to simultaneously capture the externality and exogenous influence of features, leading to unreasonable interpretations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel feature attribution method called DAG-SHAP, which is based on edge intervention. DAG-SHAP treats each feature edge as an individual attribution object, ensuring that both externality and exogenous contributions of features are appropriately captured. Additionally, we introduce an approximation method for efficiently computing DAG-SHAP. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of DAG-SHAP. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-DIVER/DAG-SHAP.
Thodoris Lymperopoulos, Ioannis Kakogeorgiou, Denia Kanellopouloucs.LG cs.CV
Occlusion-based attribution methods provide an intuitive way to estimate feature importance by perturbing input features and measuring the resulting change in model output. However, their reliability is strongly affected by how feature removal is implemented: externally selected baselines can introduce bias, out-of-distribution samples, and unstable explanations, while in nonlinear models the occlusion of a set of features can also alter the contribution of non-occluded features. We refer to this effect as attribution shift, as the attribution scores of the non-occluded features drift from their initial values. To challenge these major issues that render explanations unstable, we introduce XtrAIn, a training-guided attribution method that transfers the occlusion operation from the input space to the parameter space. Instead of replacing input values with hand-crafted baselines, XtrAIn follows the model's training trajectory and measures how feature-associated parameter updates affect the output logits. We further introduce Xstep, a lightweight approximation for reducing computational cost, and XtrAIn+, a target-focused variant that emphasizes updates aligned with the target class. Experiments on controlled image datasets and PAM50 breast-cancer subtype classification show that the proposed methods produce cleaner and more interpretable attribution patterns than standard attribution baselines. Overall, XtrAIn provides a training-aware perspective on feature attribution and offers a useful diagnostic tool for studying how feature-level evidence is formed during training.
Feature attribution methods explain predictions by assigning importance scores to input features. Path-based methods such as Integrated Gradients are especially appealing because they satisfy \textit{completeness}: attributions sum to the change in model output between a reference state and the input. Yet most path methods define this trajectory in input space, explaining a model through pointwise perturbed inputs along a chosen path. An input-space path integrates the model's raw response at each point it passes through, with no control over the resolution at which a feature is queried; the early, baseline-adjacent part of the trajectory contributes to the explanation on equal footing with the input itself. Here, we lift path attribution from input space to a space of structured probe distributions around the example of interest, and call our method Reveal-IG. Rather than traversing raw input values, Reveal-IG progressively reveals information about the input and attributes changes in the model's expected output along this distributional path. The result is a path-attribution framework that retains completeness with respect to the expected model response, and naturally accommodates multiscale image probes and feature-wise uncertainty in tabular data. Synthetic diagnostics show that Reveal-IG avoids path artifacts that affect input-space methods, and across ImageNet classification and tabular regression it produces stable, signed attributions -- leading on metrics that use attribution sign while remaining competitive on the rest.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in modeling complex relational data, however their interpretability in high-stakes applications remains a critical challenge. Existing explanation methods suffer from two major limitations: on the one hand, the generated explanations fail to reflect the inherent semantic hierarchy of HGNNs, resulting in a lack of fidelity to the model's internal decision-making mechanism; on the other hand, feature explanations often rely on complex search or perturbation mechanisms, leading to excessive computational complexity and poor efficiency. To address these issues, we propose HiSE, a lightweight feature-oriented interpretable model for HGNNs. HiSE achieves semantically aware feature explanations through hierarchical semantic modeling: at the semantic level, local surrogate models based on the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) are employed to learn sparse feature representations under each semantic view; at the cross-semantic level, the contributions of different semantic views are adaptively characterized via KL divergence to produce a unified explanation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiSE outperforms existing methods in terms of fidelity, robustness, and cross-semantic explanation capability, while its lightweight framework incurs low computational overhead, enabling efficient application to large-scale, complex real-world heterogeneous graphs.
Santo M. A. R. Thies, Hubert Baniecki, R. Teal Witter +3cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Shapley and Banzhaf interactions capture the complex dynamics inherent in modern machine learning applications. However, current estimators for these higher-order interactions trade off between speed and accuracy. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ProxySHAP. ProxySHAP reconciles the high sample efficiency of tree-based proxy models with a principled path to consistency via residual correction. On a theoretical level, we derive a polynomial-time generalization of interventional TreeSHAP to compute exact interaction indices for tree ensembles, successfully bypassing exponential tree-depth dependencies in prior methods. Furthermore, we formally analyze the residual adjustment strategy, characterizing the specific conditions under which Maximum Sample Reuse (MSR) corrects proxy bias without its variance scaling exponentially with interaction size. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates that ProxySHAP sets a new state-of-the-art standard for approximation quality, including in large-scale applications with thousands of features. By achieving the lowest error in both small- and large-budget regimes, ProxySHAP significantly outperforms the prior best estimators ProxySPEX and KernelSHAP-IQ, while also delivering superior performance on downstream explainability tasks.
Soyeon Kim, Seongwoo Lim, Kyowoon Lee +1cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Feature attribution is central to diagnosing and trusting deep neural networks, and Integrated Gradients (IG) is widely used due to its axiomatic properties. However, IG can yield unreliable explanations when the integration path between a baseline and the input passes through regions with noisy gradients. While Guided Integrated Gradients reduces this sensitivity by adaptively updating low-gradient-magnitude features, input-space guidance still produces intermediate inputs that deviate from the data manifold. To address this limitation, we propose \emph{Manifold-Aligned Guided Integrated Gradients} (MA-GIG), which constructs attribution paths in the latent space of a pre-trained variational autoencoder. By decoding intermediate latent states, MA-GIG biases the path toward the learned generative manifold and reduces exposure to implausible input-space regions. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that MA-GIG produces faithful explanations by aggregating gradients on path features proximal to the input. Consequently, our method reduces off-manifold noise and outperforms prior path-based attribution methods across multiple datasets and classifiers. Our code is available at https://github.com/leekwoon/ma-gig/.