Formalising the robustness of counterfactual explanations for neural networks
File(s)submission.pdf (2.02 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Jiang, Jay
Leofante, Francesco
Rago, Antonio
Toni, Francesca
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
The use of counterfactual explanations (CFXs) is an increasingly popular explanation strategy for machine learning models. However, recent studies have shown that these explanations may not be robust to changes in the underlying model (e.g., following retraining), which raises questions about their reliability in real-world applications. Existing attempts towards solving this problem are heuristic, and the robustness to model changes of the resulting CFXs is evaluated with only a small number of retrained models, failing to provide exhaustive guarantees. To remedy this, we propose the first notion to formally and deterministically assess the robustness (to model changes) of CFXs for neural networks, that we call ∆-robustness. We introduce an abstraction framework based on interval neural networks to verify the ∆-robustness of CFXs against a possibly infinite set of changes to the model parameters, i.e., weights and biases. We then demonstrate the utility of this approach in two distinct ways. First, we analyse the ∆-robustness of a number of CFX generation methods from the literature and show that they unanimously host significant deficiencies in this regard. Second, we demonstrate how embedding ∆-robustness within existing methods can provide CFXs which are provably robust.
Date Issued
2023-06-26
Date Acceptance
2022-11-18
Citation
Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023, 37 (12), pp.14901-14909
ISSN
2374-3468
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Start Page
14901
End Page
14909
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume
37
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© 2023, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Source
37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2023-02-07
Finish Date
2023-02-14
Coverage Spatial
Washington, DC, USA