A Learning-based Approach for Explaining Language Models

We present Learning Attributions (LA), a novel method for explaining language models. The core idea behind LA is to train a dedicated attribution model that functions as a surrogate explainer for the language model. This attribution model is designed to identify which tokens are most influential in driving the model's predictions. By optimizing the attribution model to mask the minimal amount of information necessary to induce substantial changes in the language model's output, LA provides a mechanism to understand which tokens in the input are critical for the model's decisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LA across several language models, highlighting its superiority over multiple state-of-the-art explanation methods across various datasets and evaluation metrics.