Generating Deep Learning Model-Specific Explanations at the End User’s Side

Abstract

End users who cannot afford to collect and label big data to train accurate deep learning (DL) models resort to Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) providers, who provide paid access to accurate DL models. However, the lack of transparency in how the providers’ models make predictions causes a problem of trust. A way to increase trust (and also to align with ethical regulations) is for predictions to be accompanied by explanations locally and independently generated by the end users (rather than by explanations offered by the model providers). Explanation methods using internal components of DL models (a.k.a. model-specific explanations) are more accurate and effective than those relying solely on the inputs and outputs (a.k.a. model-agnostic explanations). However, end users lack white-box access to the internal components of the providers’ models. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel approach allowing an end user to locally generate model-specific explanations for a DL classification model accessed via a provider’s API. First, we approximate the provider’s model with a local surrogate model. We then use the surrogate model’s components to locally generate model-specific explanations that approximate the explanations obtainable with white-box access to the provider’s DL model. Specifically, we leverage the surrogate model’s gradients to generate adversarial examples that counterfactually explain why an input example is classified into a specific class. Our approach only requires the end user to have unlabeled data of size [Formula: see text] of the provider’s training data and with a similar distribution; given the small size and unlabeled nature of these data, they can be assumed to be already available to the end user or even to be supplied by the provider to build trust in his model. We demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments on two ML tasks: image classification and tabular data classification. The locally generated explanations are consistent with those obtainable with white-box access to the provider’s model, thus giving end users an independent and reliable way to determine if the provider’s model is trustworthy.