Derivative-Free Diffusion Manifold-Constrained Gradient for Unified XAI
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gradient-based methods are a prototypical family of "explainability for AI" (XAI) techniques, especially for image-based models. However, they (1) require white-box access to models, (2) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and (3) produce attributions that lie off the image manifold, leading to explanations that are not amenable to human perception. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Derivative-Free Diffusion Manifold-Contrained Gradients (FreeMCG): by leveraging ensemble Kalman filters and diffusion models, we derive a derivative-free approximation of the model’s gradient projected onto the data manifold, requiring access only to the model’s outputs (i.e., black-box setting). We demonstrate the effectiveness of FreeMCG by applying it to both counterfactual generation and feature attribution, which have traditionally been treated as different tasks requiring distinct methods. Through comprehensive evaluation on both counter-factual explanation and feature attribution we show that our method yields state-of-the-art results for both tasks while preserving the essential properties expected of XAI tools. Code: https://github.com/one-june/FreeMCG.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".