By their nature, the composition of black box models is opaque. This makes the ability to generate explanations for the response to stimuli challenging. The importance of explaining black box models has become increasingly important given the prevalence of AI and ML systems and the need to build legal and regulatory frameworks around them. Such explanations can also increase trust in these uncertain systems. In our paper we present RICE, a method for generating explanations of the behaviour of black box models by (1) probing a model to extract model output examples using sensitivity analysis; (2) applying CNPInduce, a method for inductive logic program synthesis, to generate logic programs based on critical input-output pairs; and (3) interpreting the target program as a human-readable explanation. We demonstrate the application of our method by generating explanations of an artificial neural network trained to follow simple traffic rules in a hypothetical self-driving car simulation. We conclude with a discussion on the scalability and usability of our approach and its potential applications to explanation-critical scenarios.
In @cite_10 the authors produced an Open the black box taxonomy'' to better understand different approaches to explaining black box models. At the top level there are two options: To formulate a black box explanation, and design a transparent box. The latter has been discussed in some depth in @cite_20 where its author argues that explanations are often unreliable and misleading, and therefore black box models should not be used for critical systems. She cites several examples where lack of transparency and accountability of predictive models have had severe consequences. Counter-arguments to interpretable ML models include black boxes holding significant value and intellectual property for the model authors, and that interpretable models can be more costly to construct. They further define the that requires an explanation model that is globally interpretable''; that is to be able to mimic the behaviour of the black box should be understandable by a human.
@cite_10 @cite_20
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The recent years have witnessed the rise of accurate but obscure decision systems which hide the logic of their internal decision processes to the users. The lack of explanations for the decisions of black box systems is a key ethical issue, and a limitation to the adoption of machine learning components in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. Therefore, we need explanations that reveals the reasons why a predictor takes a certain decision. In this paper we focus on the problem of black box outcome explanation, i.e., explaining the reasons of the decision taken on a specific instance. We propose LORE, an agnostic method able to provide interpretable and faithful explanations. LORE first leans a local interpretable predictor on a synthetic neighborhood generated by a genetic algorithm. Then it derives from the logic of the local interpretable predictor a meaningful explanation consisting of: a decision rule, which explains the reasons of the decision; and a set of counterfactual rules, suggesting the changes in the instance's features that lead to a different outcome. Wide experiments show that LORE outperforms existing methods and baselines both in the quality of explanations and in the accuracy in mimicking the black box. The widescale use of machine learning algorithms to drive decision-making has highlighted the critical importance of ensuring the interpretability of such models in order to engender trust in their output. The state-of-the-art recommendation systems use black-box latent factor models that provide no explanation of why a recommendation has been made, as they abstract their decision processes to a high-dimensional latent space which is beyond the direct comprehension of humans. We propose a novel approach for extracting explanations from latent factor recommendation systems by training association rules on the output of a matrix factorisation black-box model. By taking advantage of the interpretable structure of association rules, we demonstrate that predictive accuracy of the recommendation model can be maintained whilst yielding explanations with high fidelity to the black-box model on a unique industry dataset. Our approach mitigates the accuracy-interpretability trade-off whilst avoiding the need to sacrifice flexibility or use external data sources. We also contribute to the ill-defined problem of evaluating interpretability. Black-box risk scoring models permeate our lives, yet are typically proprietary or opaque. We propose a transparent model distillation approach to audit such models. Model distillation was first introduced to transfer knowledge from a large, complex teacher model to a faster, simpler student model without significant loss in prediction accuracy. To this we add a third criterion - transparency. To gain insight into black-box models, we treat them as teachers, training transparent student models to mimic the risk scores assigned by the teacher. Moreover, we use side information in the form of the actual outcomes the teacher scoring model was intended to predict in the first place. By training a second transparent model on the outcomes, we can compare the two models to each other. When comparing models trained on risk scores to models trained on outcomes, we show that it is necessary to calibrate the risk-scoring model's predictions to remove distortion that may have been added to the black-box risk-scoring model during or after its training process. We also show how to compute confidence intervals for the particular class of transparent student models we use - tree-based additive models with pairwise interactions (GA2Ms) - to support comparison of the two transparent models. We demonstrate the methods on four public datasets: COMPAS, Lending Club, Stop-and-Frisk, and Chicago Police. Many deployed learned models are black boxes: given input, returns output. Internal information about the model, such as the architecture, optimisation procedure, or training data, is not disclosed explicitly as it might contain proprietary information or make the system more vulnerable. This work shows that such attributes of neural networks can be exposed from a sequence of queries. This has multiple implications. On the one hand, our work exposes the vulnerability of black-box neural networks to different types of attacks -- we show that the revealed internal information helps generate more effective adversarial examples against the black box model. On the other hand, this technique can be used for better protection of private content from automatic recognition models using adversarial examples. Our paper suggests that it is actually hard to draw a line between white box and black box models.