{"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/learning-to-scaffold-optimizing-model","title":"Learning to Scaffold: Optimizing Model Explanations for Teaching","arxiv_id":"2204.10810","date":"2022-04-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Patrick Fernandes","Marcos Treviso","Danish Pruthi","André F. T. Martins","Graham Neubig"],"abstract":"Modern machine learning models are opaque, and as a result there is a burgeoning academic subfield on methods that explain these models' behavior. However, what is the precise goal of providing such explanations, and how can we demonstrate that explanations achieve this goal? Some research argues that explanations should help teach a student (either human or machine) to simulate the model being explained, and that the quality of explanations can be measured by the simulation accuracy of students on unexplained examples. In this work, leveraging meta-learning techniques, we extend this idea to improve the quality of the explanations themselves, specifically by optimizing explanations such that student models more effectively learn to simulate the original model. We train models on three natural language processing and computer vision tasks, and find that students trained with explanations extracted with our framework are able to simulate the teacher significantly more effectively than ones produced with previous methods. Through human annotations and a user study, we further find that these learned explanations more closely align with how humans would explain the required decisions in these tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/coderpat/learning-scaffold","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10810v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.10810v2.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":"learning-to-scaffold-optimizing-model","repo_url":"https://github.com/coderpat/learning-scaffold","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"jax","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2204.10810","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2204.10810"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/coderpat/learning-scaffold","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"e947e29a5c9b1b1e","entry":"predict_and_explain","repo":"coderpat/learning-scaffold","repo_kind":"official","path":"example.py","file_url":"https://github.com/coderpat/learning-scaffold/blob/HEAD/example.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e947e29a5c9b1b1e"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}