{"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/on-gradient-like-explanation-under-a-black","title":"On Gradient-like Explanation under a Black-box Setting: When Black-box Explanations Become as Good as White-box","arxiv_id":"2308.09381","date":"2023-08-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yi Cai","Gerhard Wunder"],"abstract":"Attribution methods shed light on the explainability of data-driven approaches such as deep learning models by uncovering the most influential features in a to-be-explained decision. While determining feature attributions via gradients delivers promising results, the internal access required for acquiring gradients can be impractical under safety concerns, thus limiting the applicability of gradient-based approaches. In response to such limited flexibility, this paper presents \\methodAbr~(gradient-estimation-based explanation), an approach that produces gradient-like explanations through only query-level access. The proposed approach holds a set of fundamental properties for attribution methods, which are mathematically rigorously proved, ensuring the quality of its explanations. In addition to the theoretical analysis, with a focus on image data, the experimental results empirically demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art black-box methods and its competitive performance compared to methods with full access.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09381v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.09381v3.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":"on-gradient-like-explanation-under-a-black","repo_url":"https://github.com/caiy0220/geex","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}