{"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/causality-for-inherently-explainable","title":"Causality for Inherently Explainable Transformers: CAT-XPLAIN","arxiv_id":"2206.14841","date":"2022-06-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Subash Khanal","Benjamin Brodie","Xin Xing","Ai-Ling Lin","Nathan Jacobs"],"abstract":"There have been several post-hoc explanation approaches developed to explain pre-trained black-box neural networks. However, there is still a gap in research efforts toward designing neural networks that are inherently explainable. In this paper, we utilize a recently proposed instance-wise post-hoc causal explanation method to make an existing transformer architecture inherently explainable. Once trained, our model provides an explanation in the form of top-$k$ regions in the input space of the given instance contributing to its decision. We evaluate our method on binary classification tasks using three image datasets: MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR. Our results demonstrate that compared to the causality-based post-hoc explainer model, our inherently explainable model achieves better explainability results while eliminating the need of training a separate explainer model. Our code is available at https://github.com/mvrl/CAT-XPLAIN.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14841v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.14841v1.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":"causality-for-inherently-explainable","repo_url":"https://github.com/mvrl/cat-xplain","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"binary-classification","task_name":"Binary Classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}