中文

预测而非解释:重新审视映射嵌入的解释能力

计算与语言 2025-08-20 v1 人工智能 机器学习

摘要

Understanding what knowledge is implicitly encoded in deep learning models is essential for improving the interpretability of AI systems. This paper examines common methods to explain the knowledge encoded in word embeddings, which are core elements of large language models (LLMs). These methods typically involve mapping embeddings onto collections of human-interpretable semantic features, known as feature norms. Prior work assumes that accurately predicting these semantic features from the word embeddings implies that the embeddings contain the corresponding knowledge. We challenge this assumption by demonstrating that prediction accuracy alone does not reliably indicate genuine feature-based interpretability. We show that these methods can successfully predict even random information, concluding that the results are predominantly determined by an algorithmic upper bound rather than meaningful semantic representation in the word embeddings. Consequently, comparisons between datasets based solely on prediction performance do not reliably indicate which dataset is better captured by the word embeddings. Our analysis illustrates that such mappings primarily reflect geometric similarity within vector spaces rather than indicating the genuine emergence of semantic properties.

关键词

引用

@article{arxiv.2508.13729,
  title  = {Prediction is not Explanation: Revisiting the Explanatory Capacity of Mapping Embeddings},
  author = {Hanna Herasimchyk and Alhassan Abdelhalim and Sören Laue and Michaela Regneri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.13729},
  year   = {2025}
}

备注

10 pages, 6 Figures. Published at ECAI 2025 in a version without the Appendix