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A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks

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arxiv 1806.10758 v3 pith:NGJCUYVM submitted 2018-06-28 cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML

classification cs.LGcs.AIstat.ML
keywords importancefeaturebetterdeepestimatesinterpretabilitymethodsnetworks
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We propose an empirical measure of the approximate accuracy of feature importance estimates in deep neural networks. Our results across several large-scale image classification datasets show that many popular interpretability methods produce estimates of feature importance that are not better than a random designation of feature importance. Only certain ensemble based approaches---VarGrad and SmoothGrad-Squared---outperform such a random assignment of importance. The manner of ensembling remains critical, we show that some approaches do no better then the underlying method but carry a far higher computational burden.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 382 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. On Spectral Properties of Gradient-based Explanation Methods

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gradient-based explanations behave like frequency-band selectors: the gradient acts as a high-pass filter, perturbation as a low-pass filter, and their combination creates explanations that shift with the perturbation scale.

  2. From Features to Actions: Explainability in Traditional and Agentic AI Systems

    cs.AI 2026-02 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Attribution explanations that work for static classifiers do not diagnose failures in multi-step AI agents; trace-grounded rubric evaluation does, with state-tracking inconsistency 2.7x more common in failed agent runs.

  3. On the Complexity-Faithfulness Trade-off of Gradient-Based Explanations

    cs.LG 2025-08 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper introduces EF and ΔEF as spectral metrics, but ΔEF is derived from EF, making the complexity-faithfulness trade-off partly tautological.

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