[Submitted on 2 Sep 2026]
Title:ProToMEx: Rapid, Interpretable Explanations via Structured Representations
View a PDF of the paper titled ProToMEx: Rapid, Interpretable Explanations via Structured Representations, by Athina Georgara and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Existing post-hoc explainers for machine learning classifiers primarily focus on feature attribution, assigning importance scores to individual features. While valuable, this approach struggles to articulate the complex, combinatorial patterns that often drive a model's decision-making process. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ProToMEx, a new paradigm for explainability that leverages Probabilistic Topic Models (PTMs). Our model-agnostic framework learns latent ''topics'' that represent distinct, high-level reasons for a classification, moving beyond simple feature importance to reveal underlying semantic structures. ProToMEx naturally provides both global explanations of a model's overall behaviour and local explanations that can disentangle multiple co-existing reasons for a specific prediction. We demonstrate empirically that ProToMEx not only produces explanations of comparable fidelity to popular methods like SHAP and LIME but also drastically reduces the amortised computational cost of generating local explanations, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Specifically, we show that ProToMEx is ~30-40x faster than SHAP and LIME over standardised tabular datasets and synthetic datasets.
Subjects:
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.04265 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2609.04265v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04265
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Athina Georgara [view email] [v1] Wed, 2 Sep 2026 18:39:29 UTC (71 KB)
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