# (Un)reasonable Allure of Ante-hoc Interpretability for High-stakes Domains: Transparency Is Necessary but Insufficient for Comprehensibility

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02312 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02312/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [Network Dissection: Quantifying Interpretability of Deep Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05796/) (2017)
- [Explainability Fact Sheets: A Framework for Systematic Assessment of Explainable Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05100/) (2019)
- [An Evaluation of the Human-Interpretability of Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00006/) (2019)
- [Principles of Explanation in Human-AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04972/) (2021)
- [Explainability Is in the Mind of the Beholder: Establishing the Foundations of Explainable Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14466/) (2021)
- [Mind the Gap! Bridging Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Human Understanding with Luhmann's Functional Theory of Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03460/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Representations in Explainable AI: From Theory to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07007/) (2020)
- [Helpful, Misleading or Confusing: How Humans Perceive Fundamental Building Blocks of Artificial Intelligence Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00934/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Artificial Intelligence Should Genuinely Support Clinical Reasoning and Decision Making To Bridge the Translational Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05030/) (2025)
- [What Does Evaluation of Explainable Artificial Intelligence Actually Tell Us? A Case for Compositional and Contextual Validation of XAI Building Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12730/) (2024)
- [Reallocating Attention Across Layers to Reduce Multimodal Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10285/) (2025)
- [Counterfactual Explanations via Locally-guided Sequential Algorithmic Recourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04211/) (2023)
- [Birds look like cars: Adversarial analysis of intrinsically interpretable deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08636/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty Quantification as a Principled Foundation for Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Case Study of Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17007/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ante-hoc interpretability has become the holy grail of explainable artificial intelligence for high-stakes domains such as healthcare; however, this notion is elusive, lacks a widely-accepted definition and depends on the operational context. It can refer to predictive models whose structure adheres to domain-specific constraints, or ones that are inherently transparent. The latter conceptualisation assumes observers who judge this quality, whereas the former presupposes them to have technical and domain expertise (thus alienating other groups of explainees). Additionally, the distinction between ante-hoc interpretability and the less desirable post-hoc explainability, which refers to methods that construct a separate explanatory model, is vague given that transparent predictive models may still require (post-)processing to yield suitable explanatory insights. Ante-hoc interpretability is thus an overloaded concept that comprises a range of implicit properties, which we unpack in this paper to better understand what is needed for its safe adoption across high-stakes domains. To this end, we outline modelling and explaining desiderata that allow us to navigate its distinct realisations in view of the envisaged application and audience.