Explaining Neural Networks without Access to Training Data
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We consider generating explanations for neural networks in cases where the network's training data is not accessible, for instance due to privacy or safety issues. Recently, ℐ-Nets have been proposed as a sample-free approach to post-hoc, global model interpretability that does not require access to training data. They formulate interpretation as a machine learning task that maps network representations (parameters) to a representation of an interpretable function. In this paper, we extend the ℐ-Net framework to the cases of standard and soft decision trees as surrogate models. We propose a suitable decision tree representation and design of the corresponding ℐ-Net output layers. Furthermore, we make ℐ-Nets applicable to real-world tasks by considering more realistic distributions when generating the ℐ-Net's training data. We empirically evaluate our approach against traditional global, post-hoc interpretability approaches and show that it achieves superior results when the training data is not accessible.
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