TLXML: Task-Level Explanation of Meta-Learning via Influence Functions

TL;DR

TLXML introduces a scalable influence function-based framework for providing task-level explanations in meta-learning, enhancing interpretability and trustworthiness of models by identifying the impact of individual training tasks.

Contribution

It extends influence functions to bi-level optimization in meta-learning, enabling task-level explanations and a scalable approximation method.

Findings

Effectively ranks training tasks by influence on performance

Provides concise, intuitive explanations aligned with user abstraction

Reduces computational complexity significantly

Abstract

Meta-learning enables models to rapidly adapt to new tasks by leveraging prior experience, but its adaptation mechanisms remain opaque, especially regarding how past training tasks influence future predictions. We introduce TLXML (Task-Level eXplanation of Meta-Learning), a novel framework that extends influence functions to meta-learning settings, enabling task-level explanations of adaptation and inference. By reformulating influence functions for bi-level optimization, TLXML quantifies the contribution of each meta-training task to the adapted model's behaviour. To ensure scalability, we propose a Gauss-Newton-based approximation that significantly reduces computational complexity from $O(pq^2)$ to $O(pq)$, where p and q denote model and meta parameters, respectively. Results demonstrate that TLXML effectively ranks training tasks by their influence on downstream performance, offering concise and intuitive explanations aligned with user-level abstraction. This work provides a critical step toward interpretable and trustworthy meta-learning systems.