# ABLE: Using Adversarial Pairs to Construct Local Models for Explaining Model Predictions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21952 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21952/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [Interpretation of Neural Networks is Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10547/) (2017)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [HopSkipJumpAttack: A Query-Efficient Decision-Based Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02144/) (2019)
- [Learning to Explain: An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Model Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07814/) (2018)
- [Model-Agnostic Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05386/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Robustness Toolbox v1.0.0](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01069/) (2018)
- [Supersparse Linear Integer Models for Optimized Medical Scoring Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04269/) (2015)
- [Falling Rule Lists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5899/) (2014)
- [DLIME: A Deterministic Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations Approach for Computer-Aided Diagnosis Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10263/) (2019)
- [ALIME: Autoencoder Based Approach for Local Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02437/) (2019)
- [GLIME: General, Stable and Local LIME Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15722/) (2023)
- [Tailoring Adversarial Attacks on Deep Neural Networks for Targeted Class Manipulation Using DeepFool Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13019/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning models are increasingly used in critical applications but are mostly "black boxes" due to their lack of transparency. Local explanation approaches, such as LIME, address this issue by approximating the behavior of complex models near a test instance using simple, interpretable models. However, these approaches often suffer from instability and poor local fidelity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Adversarially Bracketed Local Explanation (ABLE) to address these limitations. Our approach first generates a set of neighborhood points near the test instance, x_test, by adding bounded Gaussian noise. For each neighborhood point D, we apply an adversarial attack to generate an adversarial point A with minimal perturbation that results in a different label than D. A second adversarial attack is then performed on A to generate a point A' that has the same label as D (and thus different than A). The points A and A' form an adversarial pair that brackets the local decision boundary for x_test. We then train a linear model on these adversarial pairs to approximate the local decision boundary. Experimental results on six UCI benchmark datasets across three deep neural network architectures demonstrate that our approach achieves higher stability and fidelity than the state-of-the-art.