{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/are-your-explanations-reliable-investigating","title":"Are Your Explanations Reliable? Investigating the Stability of LIME in Explaining Text Classifiers by Marrying XAI and Adversarial Attack","arxiv_id":"2305.12351","date":"2023-05-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Christopher Burger","Lingwei Chen","Thai Le"],"abstract":"LIME has emerged as one of the most commonly referenced tools in explainable AI (XAI) frameworks that is integrated into critical machine learning applications--e.g., healthcare and finance. However, its stability remains little explored, especially in the context of text data, due to the unique text-space constraints. To address these challenges, in this paper, we first evaluate the inherent instability of LIME on text data to establish a baseline, and then propose a novel algorithm XAIFooler to perturb text inputs and manipulate explanations that casts investigation on the stability of LIME as a text perturbation optimization problem. XAIFooler conforms to the constraints to preserve text semantics and original prediction with small perturbations, and introduces Rank-biased Overlap (RBO) as a key part to guide the optimization of XAIFooler that satisfies all the requirements for explanation similarity measure. Extensive experiments on real-world text datasets demonstrate that XAIFooler significantly outperforms all baselines by large margins in its ability to manipulate LIME's explanations with high semantic preservability.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12351v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.12351v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"are-your-explanations-reliable-investigating","repo_url":"https://github.com/cburgerolemiss/xaifooler","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"adversarial-attack","task_name":"Adversarial Attack"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"lime","method_name":"LIME"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.12351","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}