The FIX Benchmark: Extracting Features Interpretable to eXperts

Feature-based methods are commonly used to explain model predictions, but these methods often implicitly assume that interpretable features are readily available. However, this is often not the case for high-dimensional data, and it can be hard even for domain experts to mathematically specify which features are important. Can we instead automatically extract collections or groups of features that are aligned with expert knowledge? To address this gap, we present FIX (Features Interpretable to eXperts), a benchmark for measuring how well a collection of features aligns with expert knowledge. In collaboration with domain experts, we have developed feature interpretability objectives across diverse real-world settings and unified them into a single framework that is the FIX benchmark. We find that popular feature-based explanation methods have poor alignment with expert-specified knowledge, highlighting the need for new methods that can better identify features interpretable to experts.

Sum-of-Parts Models: Faithful Attributions for Groups of Features

An explanation of a machine learning model is considered "faithful" if it accurately reflects the model's decision-making process. However, explanations such as feature attributions for deep learning are not guaranteed to be faithful, and can produce potentially misleading interpretations. In this work, we develop Sum-of-Parts (SOP), a class of models whose predictions come with grouped feature attributions that are faithful-by-construction. This model decomposes a prediction into an interpretable sum of scores, each of which is directly attributable to a sparse group of features. We evaluate SOP on benchmarks with standard interpretability metrics, and in a case study, we use the faithful explanations from SOP to help astrophysicists discover new knowledge about galaxy formation.

Causal Reasoning of Entities and Events in Procedural Texts

Entities and events have long been regarded as the crux of machine reasoning. Specifically, procedural texts have received increasing attention due to the dynamic nature of involved entities and events. Existing work has exclusively focused on entity state tracking (e.g., the temperature of a pan) or counterfactual event reasoning (e.g., how likely am I to burn myself by touching the pan), while these two tasks are tightly intertwined. In this work, we propose CREPE, the first benchmark on causal reasoning about event plausibility based on entity states. We experiment with strong large language models and show that most models including GPT3 perform close to chance of .30 F1, lagging far behind the human performance of .87 F1. Inspired by the finding that structured representations such as programming languages benefits event reasoning as a prompt to code language models such as Codex, we creatively inject the causal relations between entities and events through intermediate variables and boost the performance to .67 to .72 F1. Our proposed event representation not only allows for knowledge injection, but also marks the first successful attempt of chain-of-thought reasoning with code language models.

Macro-Average: Rare Types Are Important Too

While traditional corpus-level evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) correlate well with fluency, they struggle to reflect adequacy. Model-based MT metrics trained on segment-level human judgments have emerged as an attractive replacement due to strong correlation results. These models, however, require potentially expensive re-training for new domains and languages. Furthermore, their decisions are inherently non-transparent and appear to reflect unwelcome biases. We explore the simple type-based classifier metric, MacroF1, and study its applicability to MT evaluation. We find that MacroF1 is competitive on direct assessment, and outperforms others in indicating downstream cross-lingual information retrieval task performance. Further, we show that MacroF1 can be used to effectively compare supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation, and reveal significant qualitative differences in the methods' outputs.

Hard-Coded Gaussian Attention for Neural Machine Translation

Recent work has questioned the importance of the Transformer's multi-headed attention for achieving high translation quality. We push further in this direction by developing a "hard-coded" attention variant without any learned parameters. Surprisingly, replacing all learned self-attention heads in the encoder and decoder with fixed, input-agnostic Gaussian distributions minimally impacts BLEU scores across four different language pairs. However, additionally hard-coding cross attention (which connects the decoder to the encoder) significantly lowers BLEU, suggesting that it is more important than self-attention. Much of this BLEU drop can be recovered by adding just a single learned cross attention head to an otherwise hard-coded Transformer. Taken as a whole, our results offer insight into which components of the Transformer are actually important, which we hope will guide future work into the development of simpler and more efficient attention-based models.