
Graduate students
Myeongjin Lee
PhD student (24.03 ~ )
- BS from GIST, 2024
- Research interest: XAI for diffusion models
- lmjk311 (at) kaist.ac.kr

Graduate students
PhD student (24.03 ~ )
2 notes

2025
A game-theoretic reformulation makes feature interactions explicit and improves attribution when negative interactions are present.

2025
We study causal interactions for payoff allocation in cooperative game theory, including quantifying feature attribution for deep learning models. Most feature attribution methods mainly stem from the criteria of the Shapley value, which assigns fair payoffs to players based on their expected contribution in a cooperative game. However, interactions between players in the game do not explicitly appear in the original formulation of the Shapley value. In this work, we reformulate the Shapley value to clarify the role of interactions and discuss implicit assumptions from a game-theoretical perspective. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that when negative interactions exist—common in deep learning models—the efficiency axiom can lead to the undervaluation of attributions or payoffs. We suggest a new allocation rule that decomposes contributions into interactions and aggregates positive parts for non-convex games. Furthermore, we propose an approximation algorithm to reduce the cost of interaction computation which can be applied to differentiable functions such as deep learning models. Our approach mitigates counterintuitive attribution outcomes observed in existing methods, ensuring that features critical to a model’s decision receive appropriate attribution.
3 papers