Papers › Towards a fuller understanding of neurons with Clustered Compositional Explanations

Towards a fuller understanding of neurons with Clustered Compositional Explanations

27 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2310.18443archive 2025-07-28

Biagio La Rosa, Leilani H. Gilpin, Roberto Capobianco

Compositional Explanations is a method for identifying logical formulas of concepts that approximate the neurons' behavior. However, these explanations are linked to the small spectrum of neuron activations (i.e., the highest ones) used to check the alignment, thus lacking completeness. In this paper, we propose a generalization, called Clustered Compositional Explanations, that combines Compositional Explanations with clustering and a novel search heuristic to approximate a broader spectrum of the neurons' behavior. We define and address the problems connected to the application of these methods to multiple ranges of activations, analyze the insights retrievable by using our algorithm, and propose desiderata qualities that can be used to study the explanations returned by different algorithms.

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