Strengthening Interpretability: An Investigative Study of Integrated Gradient Methods

TMLR Paper2671 Authors

11 May 2024 (modified: 13 May 2024)Under review for TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: We conducted a reproducibility study on Integrated Gradients (IG) based methods and the Important Direction Gradient Integration (IDGI) framework. IDGI eliminates the explanation noise in each step of the computation of IG-based methods that use the Riemann Integration for integrated gradient computation. We perform a rigorous theoretical analysis of IDGI and raise a few critical questions that we later address through our study. We also experimentally verify the authors' claims concerning the performance of IDGI over IG-based methods. Additionally, we varied the number of steps used in the Riemann approximation, an essential parameter in all IG methods, and analyzed the corresponding change in results. We also studied the numerical instability of the attribution methods to check the consistency of the saliency maps produced. We developed the complete code to implement IDGI over the baseline IG methods and evaluated them using three metrics since the available code was insufficient for this study. Our code is readily usable and publicly available at [link-hidden-for-submission].
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Yingnian_Wu1
Submission Number: 2671
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