# Interpreto: An Explainability Library for Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09730 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09730/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08600/) (2023)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11279/) (2017)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Captum: A unified and generic model interpretability library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07896/) (2020)
- [The Falcon Series of Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16867/) (2023)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Build Predictions by Promoting Concepts in the Vocabulary Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14680/) (2022)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)
- [A Benchmark for Interpretability Methods in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10758/) (2018)
- [Jumping Ahead: Improving Reconstruction Fidelity with JumpReLU Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14435/) (2024)
- [AxBench: Steering LLMs? Even Simple Baselines Outperform Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17148/) (2025)
- [CRAFT: Concept Recursive Activation FacTorization for Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10154/) (2022)
- [SAEBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Sparse Autoencoders in Language Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09532/) (2025)
- [Invertible Concept-based Explanations for CNN Models with Non-negative Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15417/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Limitations of Automated Simulatability: LLM Simulators Can Bypass Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08585/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interpreto is an open-source Python library for interpreting HuggingFace language models, from early BERT variants to LLMs. It provides two complementary families of methods: attribution methods and concept-based explanations. The library bridges recent research and practical tooling by exposing explanation workflows through a unified API for both classification and text generation. A key differentiator is its end-to-end concept-based pipeline (from activation extraction to concept learning, interpretation, and scoring), which goes beyond feature-level attributions and is uncommon in existing libraries. See GitHub: https://github.com/FOR-sight-ai/interpreto and the demo website: https://for-sight-ai.github.io/interpreto-demo/.