Stability Guarantees for Feature Attributions with Multiplicative Smoothing

Explanation methods for machine learning models tend to not provide any formal guarantees and may not reflect the underlying decision-making process. In this work, we analyze stability as a property for reliable feature attribution methods. We prove that relaxed variants of stability are guaranteed if the model is sufficiently Lipschitz with respect to the masking of features. To achieve such a model, we develop a smoothing method called Multiplicative Smoothing (MuS). We show that MuS overcomes theoretical limitations of standard smoothing techniques and can be integrated with any classifier and feature attribution method. We evaluate MuS on vision and language models with a variety of feature attribution methods, such as LIME and SHAP, and demonstrate that MuS endows feature attributions with non-trivial stability guarantees.