Robust Ranking Explanations
Chao Chen Chenghua Guo Guixiang Ma Ming Zeng Xi Zhang Sihong Xie
Robust explanations of machine learning models are critical to establish
human trust in the models. Due to limited cognition capability, most humans can
only interpret the top few salient features. It is critical to make top salient
features robust to adversarial attacks, especially those against the more
vulnerable gradient-based explanations. Existing defense measures robustness
using $\ell_p$-norms, which have weaker protection power. We define explanation
thickness for measuring salient features ranking stability, and derive
tractable surrogate bounds of the thickness to design the \textit{R2ET}
algorithm to efficiently maximize the thickness and anchor top salient
features. Theoretically, we prove a connection between R2ET and adversarial
training. Experiments with a wide spectrum of network architectures and data
modalities, including brain networks, demonstrate that R2ET attains higher
explanation robustness under stealthy attacks while retaining accuracy.