MFABA: A More Faithful and Accelerated Boundary-Based Attribution Method for Deep Neural Networks

Abstract To better understand the output of deep neural networks (DNN), attribution based methods have been an important approach for model interpretability, which assign a score for each input dimension to indicate its importance towards the model outcome. Notably, the attribution methods use the ax- ioms of sensitivity and implementation invariance to ensure the validity and reliability of attribution results. Yet, the ex- isting attribution methods present challenges for effective in- terpretation and efficient computation. In this work, we in- troduce MFABA, an attribution algorithm that adheres to ax- ioms, as a novel method for interpreting DNN. Addition- ally, we provide the theoretical proof and in-depth analy- sis for MFABA algorithm, and conduct a large scale exper- iment. The results demonstrate its superiority by achieving over 101.5142 times faster speed than the state-of-the-art at- tribution algorithms. The effectiveness of MFABA is thor- oughly evaluated through the statistical analysis in compar- ison to other methods, and the full implementation package is open-source at: https://github.com/LMBTough/MFABA.