Regularizing Black-box Models for Improved Interpretability

Most of the work on interpretable machine learning has focused on designing either inherently interpretable models, which typically trade-off accuracy for interpretability, or post-hoc explanation systems, whose explanation quality can be unpredictable. Our method, ExpO, is a hybridization of these approaches that regularizes a model for explanation quality at training time. Importantly, these regularizers are differentiable, model agnostic, and require no domain knowledge to define. We demonstrate that post-hoc explanations for ExpO-regularized models have better explanation quality, as measured by the common fidelity and stability metrics. We verify that improving these metrics leads to significantly more useful explanations with a user study on a realistic task.

Authors

• Gregory Plumb
• Maruan Al-Shedivat King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
• Ángel Alexander Cabrera
• Adam Perer
• Eric Xing Washington University in St. Louis
• Ameet Talwalkar Carnegie Mellon University

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