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Interpretability Needs a New Paradigm

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arxiv 2405.05386 v2 pith:C4J7SV7H submitted 2024-05-08 cs.LG cs.CLcs.CVstat.ML

Interpretability Needs a New Paradigm

classification cs.LG cs.CLcs.CVstat.ML
keywords modelsparadigmparadigmsinterpretabilityexplainedexplanationsbelievesexamining
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Interpretability is the study of explaining models in understandable terms to humans. At present, interpretability is divided into two paradigms: the intrinsic paradigm, which believes that only models designed to be explained can be explained, and the post-hoc paradigm, which believes that black-box models can be explained. At the core of this debate is how each paradigm ensures its explanations are faithful, i.e., true to the model's behavior. This is important, as false but convincing explanations lead to unsupported confidence in artificial intelligence (AI), which can be dangerous. This paper's position is that we should think about new paradigms while staying vigilant regarding faithfulness. First, by examining the history of paradigms in science, we see that paradigms are constantly evolving. Then, by examining the current paradigms, we can understand their underlying beliefs, the value they bring, and their limitations. Finally, this paper presents 3 emerging paradigms for interpretability. The first paradigm designs models such that faithfulness can be easily measured. Another optimizes models such that explanations become faithful. The last paradigm proposes to develop models that produce both a prediction and an explanation.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Compositional interpretability defines explanations as commuting syntactic-semantic mapping pairs grounded in compositionality and minimum description length, with compressive refinement and a parsimony theorem guaran...

  2. From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    The paper introduces compositional interpretability as a category-theoretic framework that casts mechanistic explanations as commuting syntactic-semantic mappings optimized under faithfulness and complexity constraint...

  3. LLMs Don't Know Their Own Decision Boundaries: The Unreliability of Self-Generated Counterfactual Explanations

    cs.LG 2025-09 conditional novelty 7.0

    Across multiple LLMs and tabular datasets, self-generated counterfactual explanations are either valid but far from minimal or minimal but rarely valid, making them unreliable.

  4. Interpretability Can Be Actionable

    cs.LG 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Interpretability research should be judged by actionability—the degree to which its insights support concrete decisions and interventions—rather than explanatory power alone.

  5. Reliability, Faithfulness, and the Limits of Post-hoc Explanations of Opaque Scientific Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Reliability and faithfulness of post-hoc explanations do not suffice to support claims about how a scientific phenomenon is structured.