Cited by 40Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Data Visualization and AnalyticsAdversarial Robustness in Machine Learning

Evaluating the Interpretability of Generative Models by Interactive Reconstruction

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Ross, Andrew, Chen, Nina, Hang, Elisa Zhao, Glassman, Elena L., Doshi-Velez, Finale·2021·Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Abstract

For machine learning models to be most useful in numerous sociotechnical systems, many have argued that they must be human-interpretable. However, despite increasing interest in interpretability, there remains no firm consensus on how to measure it. This is especially true in representation learning, where interpretability research has focused on “disentanglement” measures only applicable to synthetic datasets and not grounded in human factors. We introduce a task to quantify the human-interpretability of generative model representations, where users interactively modify representations to reconstruct target instances. On synthetic datasets, we find performance on this task much more reliably differentiates entangled and disentangled models than baseline approaches. On a real dataset, we find it differentiates between representation learning methods widely believed but never shown to produce more or less interpretable models. In both cases, we ran small-scale think-aloud studies and large-scale experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk to confirm that our qualitative and quantitative results agreed.

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Authors
Ross, A., Chen, N., Hang, E. Z., Glassman, E. L., & Doshi-Velez, F.
Affiliations
  • Harvard University (US)
  • SEAS Harvard University, United States
Venue
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
ACM
Published
2021-05-06
Pages
1-15
OpenAlex
W3126721307
Cited by
40
References
68
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 2
FWCI
3.81
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
NIH (National Institutes of Health) (1R56MH115187)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Data Visualization and Analytics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Keywords
interpretability evaluation, generative models, interactive reconstruction, representation learning, disentanglement, human interpretability, think-aloud study, Amazon Mechanical Turk, synthetic dataset, socio-technical systems

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