Papers › ProtoTEx: Explaining Model Decisions with Prototype Tensors

ProtoTEx: Explaining Model Decisions with Prototype Tensors

11 Apr 2022ACL 2022 5arXiv:2204.05426archive 2025-07-28

Anubrata Das, Chitrank Gupta, Venelin Kovatchev, Matthew Lease, Junyi Jessy Li

We present ProtoTEx, a novel white-box NLP classification architecture based on prototype networks. ProtoTEx faithfully explains model decisions based on prototype tensors that encode latent clusters of training examples. At inference time, classification decisions are based on the distances between the input text and the prototype tensors, explained via the training examples most similar to the most influential prototypes. We also describe a novel interleaved training algorithm that effectively handles classes characterized by the absence of indicative features. On a propaganda detection task, ProtoTEx accuracy matches BART-large and exceeds BERT-large with the added benefit of providing faithful explanations. A user study also shows that prototype-based explanations help non-experts to better recognize propaganda in online news.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

anubrata/prototex officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Propaganda detectionmodel

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections