Papers › "Why did you do that?": Explaining black box models with Inductive Synthesis

"Why did you do that?": Explaining black box models with Inductive Synthesis

17 Apr 2019arXiv:1904.09273archive 2025-07-28

Görkem Paçacı, David Johnson, Steve McKeever, Andreas Hamfelt

By their nature, the composition of black box models is opaque. This makes the ability to generate explanations for the response to stimuli challenging. The importance of explaining black box models has become increasingly important given the prevalence of AI and ML systems and the need to build legal and regulatory frameworks around them. Such explanations can also increase trust in these uncertain systems. In our paper we present RICE, a method for generating explanations of the behaviour of black box models by (1) probing a model to extract model output examples using sensitivity analysis; (2) applying CNPInduce, a method for inductive logic program synthesis, to generate logic programs based on critical input-output pairs; and (3) interpreting the target program as a human-readable explanation. We demonstrate the application of our method by generating explanations of an artificial neural network trained to follow simple traffic rules in a hypothetical self-driving car simulation. We conclude with a discussion on the scalability and usability of our approach and its potential applications to explanation-critical scenarios.

PaperPDFCode

Code

UppsalaIM/rice officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf 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

Program Synthesis

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