Not sure what the best way to formalize this intuition is, but here’s an idea. (To isolate this learner-agnostic/specific axis from the problem of defining explanation, let me assume that we have some metric for quantifying explanation quality, call it ‘R’ which is a function from <Model, learner, explanation> triples to real values.)
Define learner-agnostic explanation as optimizing for aggregate R across some distribution of learners—finding the one optimal explanation across this distribution. Learner-specific explanation optimizes for R taking the learner as an input—finding multiple optimal explanations, one for each learner.
The aggregation function in the learner-agnostic case could be the mean, or it could be a minimax function. The minimax case intuition would be formalizing the task of coming up with the most accessible explanation possible.
Things like influence functions, input-sensitivity methods, automated concept discovery are all learner-agnostic. On the other hand, probing methods (e.g. as used in NLP) could maybe be called learner-specific. The variant of influence functions I suggested above is learner-specific.
In general, it seems to me that as the models get more and more complex, we’ll probably need explanations to be more learner-specific to achieve reasonable performance. Though perhaps learner-agnostic methods will suffice for answering general questions like ‘Is my model optimizing for a mesa-objective’?
I guess by ‘learner’ you mean the human, rather than the learned model? If so, then I guess your transparency/explanation/knowledge-extraction method could be learner-specific, and still succeed at the above challenge.
I don’t know what you mean by “learner agnostic” or “learner specific”. Could you explain?
Not sure what the best way to formalize this intuition is, but here’s an idea. (To isolate this learner-agnostic/specific axis from the problem of defining explanation, let me assume that we have some metric for quantifying explanation quality, call it ‘R’ which is a function from <Model, learner, explanation> triples to real values.)
Define learner-agnostic explanation as optimizing for aggregate R across some distribution of learners—finding the one optimal explanation across this distribution. Learner-specific explanation optimizes for R taking the learner as an input—finding multiple optimal explanations, one for each learner.
The aggregation function in the learner-agnostic case could be the mean, or it could be a minimax function. The minimax case intuition would be formalizing the task of coming up with the most accessible explanation possible.
Things like influence functions, input-sensitivity methods, automated concept discovery are all learner-agnostic. On the other hand, probing methods (e.g. as used in NLP) could maybe be called learner-specific. The variant of influence functions I suggested above is learner-specific.
In general, it seems to me that as the models get more and more complex, we’ll probably need explanations to be more learner-specific to achieve reasonable performance. Though perhaps learner-agnostic methods will suffice for answering general questions like ‘Is my model optimizing for a mesa-objective’?
I guess by ‘learner’ you mean the human, rather than the learned model? If so, then I guess your transparency/explanation/knowledge-extraction method could be learner-specific, and still succeed at the above challenge.