Related papers: Axiomatic Causal Interventions for Reverse Enginee…

Neural ranking models have shown outstanding performance across a variety of tasks, such as document retrieval, re-ranking, question answering and conversational retrieval. However, the inner decision process of these models remains largely…

This reproducibility study analyzes and extends the paper "Axiomatic Causal Interventions for Reverse Engineering Relevance Computation in Neural Retrieval Models," which investigates how neural retrieval models encode task-relevant…

Recently, neural networks have been successfully employed to improve upon state-of-the-art performance in ad-hoc retrieval tasks via machine-learned ranking functions. While neural retrieval models grow in complexity and impact, little is…

Interpreting the inner function of neural networks is crucial for the trustworthy development and deployment of these black-box models. Prior interpretability methods focus on correlation-based measures to attribute model decisions to…

Understanding AI systems' inner workings is critical for ensuring value alignment and safety. This review explores mechanistic interpretability: reverse engineering the computational mechanisms and representations learned by neural networks…

Axiomatic information retrieval (IR) seeks a set of principle properties desirable in IR models. These properties when formally expressed provide guidance in the search for better relevance estimation functions. Neural ranking models…

Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can assess relevance and support information retrieval (IR) tasks such as document ranking and relevance judgment generation. However, the internal mechanisms by which…

Mechanistic interpretation has greatly contributed to a more detailed understanding of generative language models, enabling significant progress in identifying structures that implement key behaviors through interactions between internal…

Transformer-based models have become state-of-the-art tools in various machine learning tasks, including time series classification, yet their complexity makes understanding their internal decision-making challenging. Existing…

As machine learning continues to gain prominence, transparency and explainability are increasingly critical. Without an understanding of these models, they can replicate and worsen human bias, adversely affecting marginalized communities.…

Information retrieval models have witnessed a paradigm shift from unsupervised statistical approaches to feature-based supervised approaches to completely data-driven ones that make use of the pre-training of large language models. While…

Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse engineer neural networks by uncovering which high-level algorithms they implement. Causal abstraction provides a precise notion of when a network implements an algorithm, i.e., a causal model of…

Interpretable insights from predictive models remain critical in bio-statistics, particularly when assessing causality, where classical statistical and machine learning methods often provide inherent clarity. While Neural Networks (NNs)…

Most efforts in interpreting neural relevance models have focused on local explanations, which explain the relevance of a document to a query but are not useful in predicting the model's behavior on unseen query-document pairs. We propose a…

Ranking models lie at the heart of research on information retrieval (IR). During the past decades, different techniques have been proposed for constructing ranking models, from traditional heuristic methods, probabilistic methods, to…

Machine learning models have had discernible achievements in a myriad of applications. However, most of these models are black-boxes, and it is obscure how the decisions are made by them. This makes the models unreliable and untrustworthy.…

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) hold promise to produce language understanding systems that are are factual, efficient, and up-to-date. An important desideratum of RALMs, is that retrieved information helps model performance…

Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…

Neural document ranking models perform impressively well due to superior language understanding gained from pre-training tasks. However, due to their complexity and large number of parameters, these (typically transformer-based) models are…

Natural language processing has greatly benefited from the introduction of the attention mechanism. However, standard attention models are of limited interpretability for tasks that involve a series of inference steps. We describe an…