Improving Perturbation-Based Explanations by Understanding the Role of Uncertainty Calibration

MCML Authors

Thomas Decker

→ Group Volker Tresp
 Database Systems, Data Mining and AI

Volker Tresp

Prof. Dr.

Core PI

Database Systems, Data Mining and AI

Abstract

Perturbation-based explanations are widely utilized to enhance the transparency of machine-learning models in practice. However, their reliability is often compromised by the unknown model behavior under the specific perturbations used. This paper investigates the relationship between uncertainty calibration - the alignment of model confidence with actual accuracy - and perturbation-based explanations. We show that models systematically produce unreliable probability estimates when subjected to explainability-specific perturbations and theoretically prove that this directly undermines global and local explanation quality. To address this, we introduce ReCalX, a novel approach to recalibrate models for improved explanations while preserving their original predictions. Empirical evaluations across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that ReCalX consistently reduces perturbation-specific miscalibration most effectively while enhancing explanation robustness and the identification of globally important input features.

inproceedings DTB25a

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NeurIPS 2025

39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. San Diego, CA, USA, Nov 30-Dec 07, 2025. Spotlight Presentation.

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Authors

T. Decker • V. Tresp • F. Buettner

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Links

URL

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In Collaboration

 Siemens AG

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Research Area

 A3 | Computational Models