Technical Note: Defining and Quantifying AND-OR Interactions for Faithful and Concise Explanation of DNNs

Understand

In this technical note, we aim to explain a deep neural network (DNN) by quantifying the encoded interactions between input variables, which reflects the DNN's inference logic.

• Specifically, we first rethink the definition of interactions, and then formally define faithfulness and conciseness for interaction-based explanation.
• To this end, we propose two kinds of interactions, i.e., the AND interaction and the OR interaction.
• For faithfulness, we prove the uniqueness of the AND (OR) interaction in quantifying the effect of the AND (OR) relationship between input variables.