English

Grad-SAM: Explaining Transformers via Gradient Self-Attention Maps

Machine Learning 2022-04-26 v1

Abstract

Transformer-based language models significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in many linguistic tasks. As this revolution continues, the ability to explain model predictions has become a major area of interest for the NLP community. In this work, we present Gradient Self-Attention Maps (Grad-SAM) - a novel gradient-based method that analyzes self-attention units and identifies the input elements that explain the model's prediction the best. Extensive evaluations on various benchmarks show that Grad-SAM obtains significant improvements over state-of-the-art alternatives.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.11073,
  title  = {Grad-SAM: Explaining Transformers via Gradient Self-Attention Maps},
  author = {Oren Barkan and Edan Hauon and Avi Caciularu and Ori Katz and Itzik Malkiel and Omri Armstrong and Noam Koenigstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.11073},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:56:40.425Z