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Equation 1 · How Do We Know an Interpretability Claim Is Actually Right?

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θ\theta

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a trained model’s weights. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.

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θ\theta

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a trained model’s weights.

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This kind of benchmark descends from an older and more basic validation move: check whether an explanation changes when it should have to. Adebayo and colleagues showed that several popular saliency methods for image classifiers produce visually similar output whether the underlying model has been trained at all or left at its random initialization, meaning the “explanation” was substantially independent of what training had actually done [ 6 ] . Stated as a minimal necessary condition, if θ\theta are a trained model’s weights, θrand\theta_{\mathrm{rand}} the same architecture reinitialized at random, and ϕ(f,x)\phi(f, x) the explanation a method produces for input x under model f , then a method worth…
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This kind of benchmark descends from an older and more basic validation move: check whether an explanation changes when it should have to. Adebayo and colleagues showed that several popular saliency methods for image classifiers produce visually similar output whether the underlying model has been trained at all or left at its random initialization, meaning the “explanation” was substantially independent of what training had actually done [ 6 ] . Stated as a minimal necessary condition, if θ\theta are a trained model’s weights, θrand\theta_{\mathrm{rand}} the same architecture reinitialized at random, and ϕ(f,x)\phi(f, x) the explanation a method produces for input x under model f , then a method worth trusting should satisfy

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