Regularizing Black-box Models for Improved Interpretability

Gregory Plumb, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Ángel Alexander Cabrera, Adam Perer, Eric P. Xing, Ameet Talwalkar

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020)

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.