Rethinking Explanation Evaluation under the Retraining Scheme

TL;DR

This paper critically examines retraining-based explanation evaluation methods, identifies key issues affecting their reliability, and proposes improved variants that enhance evaluation accuracy and efficiency for model explainability.

Contribution

It reveals the sign issue as a core problem in retraining-based evaluation and introduces new variants that better align empirical results with theoretical expectations.

Findings

Revealed the sign issue causes residual information in evaluation.

Proposed variants improve evaluation efficiency and reliability.

Empirical results provide deeper insights into explainer performance.

Abstract

Feature attribution has gained prominence as a tool for explaining model decisions, yet evaluating explanation quality remains challenging due to the absence of ground-truth explanations. To circumvent this, explanation-guided input manipulation has emerged as an indirect evaluation strategy, measuring explanation effectiveness through the impact of input modifications on model outcomes during inference. Despite the widespread use, a major concern with inference-based schemes is the distribution shift caused by such manipulations, which undermines the reliability of their assessments. The retraining-based scheme ROAR overcomes this issue by adapting the model to the altered data distribution. However, its evaluation results often contradict the theoretical foundations of widely accepted explainers. This work investigates this misalignment between empirical observations and theoretical expectations. In particular, we identify the sign issue as a key factor responsible for residual information that ultimately distorts retraining-based evaluation. Based on the analysis, we show that a straightforward reframing of the evaluation process can effectively resolve the identified issue. Building on the existing framework, we further propose novel variants that jointly structure a comprehensive perspective on explanation evaluation. These variants largely improve evaluation efficiency over the standard retraining protocol, thereby enhancing practical applicability for explainer selection and benchmarking. Following our proposed schemes, empirical results across various data scales provide deeper insights into the performance of carefully selected explainers, revealing open challenges and future directions in explainability research.