The Meta-Evaluation Problem in Explainable AI: Identifying Reliable Estimators with MetaQuantus

Abstract

Explainable AI (XAI) is a rapidly evolving field that aims to improve transparency and trustworthiness of AI systems to humans. One of the unsolved challenges in XAI is estimating the performance of these explanation methods for neural networks, which has resulted in numerous competing metrics with little to no indication of which one is to be preferred. In this paper, to identify the most reliable evaluation method in a given explainability context, we propose MetaQuantus—a simple yet powerful framework that meta-evaluates two complementary performance characteristics of an evaluation method: its resilience to noise and reactivity to randomness. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through a series of experiments, targeting various open questions in XAI, such as the selection of explanation methods and optimisation of hyperparameters of a given metric. We release our work under an open-source license1 to serve as a development tool for XAI researchers and Machine Learning (ML) practitioners to verify and benchmark newly constructed metrics (i.e., “estimators” of explanation quality). With this work, we provide clear and theoretically-grounded guidance for building reliable evaluation methods, thus facilitating standardisation and reproducibility in the field of XAI.