Poster
I Bet You Did Not Mean That: Semantic Importance of Any Classifier via Betting
Jacopo Teneggi · Jeremias Sulam
East Exhibit Hall A-C #3304
Recent works have extended notions of feature importance to semantic concepts that are inherently interpretable to the users interacting with a black-box predictive model. Yet, precise statistical guarantees---such as false positive rate control---are needed to communicate findings transparently and to avoid unintended consequences in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formalize the global (i.e., over a population) and local (i.e., for a sample) statistical importance of semantic concepts by means of conditional independence, which allows for rigorous testing. We use recent ideas of sequential kernelized testing (SKIT) to induce a rank of importance across concepts, and showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of our framework on synthetic datasets as well as on image classification tasks using vision-language models such as CLIP.
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