🔍 Today's pick in Interpretability & Analysis of LMs: AttnLRP: Attention-Aware Layer-wise Relevance Propagation for Transformers by @RedOneAI et al.
This work proposes extending the LRP feature attribution framework to handling Transformers-specific layers. In particular: authors:
1. Propose a generalized approach to softmax linearization by designing a distribution rule that incorporates bias terms, absorbing of a portion of the relevance. 2. Propose decomposing the element-wise matrix multiplication in the attention operation as a sequential of epsilon and uniform distribution rules to ensure conservation (=sum of relevance stays constant across layers) 3. Propose handling normalisation layers with an identity distribution rule.
By means of extensive experiments, authors show that AttnLRP:
1. Is significantly more faithful than other popular gradient- and attention-based attribution approaches on CV and NLP tasks using large transformer models. 2. Runs in O(1) time, requiring O(sqrt(num_layers)) memory, as opposed to perturbation-based approaches requiring O(seq_len) time. 3. can be used alongside activation maximisation to explain the contribution of granular model components in driving models’ predictions.