Adaptive Explanations via Direct Preference Optimization

Abstract

Machine learning explainability aims to make the decision-making process of black-box models more transparent by finding the most important input features for a given prediction task. Recent works have proposed composing explanations from semantic concepts (e.g., colors, patterns, shapes) that are inherently interpretable to the user of a model. However, these methods generally ignore the communicative context of explanation---the ability of the user to understand the prediction of the model from the explanation. For example, while a medical doctor might understand an explanation in terms of clinical markers, a patient may need a more accessible explanation to make sense of the same diagnosis. In this work, we address this gap with listener-adaptive explanations. We propose an iterative procedure grounded in principles of pragmatic reasoning and the rational speech act to generate explanations that maximize communicative utility, and we evaluate our method on classification of lung X-rays. Our procedure only needs access to pairwise preferences between candidate explanations, relevant in real-world scenarios where a listener model may not be available.

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