CUBE: Contrastive Understanding by Balanced Experiments

arXiv:2509.10825v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Explaining a trained model requires a clear account of how explanatory evidence is generated. We propose CUBE, a post-hoc explanation framework that brings factorial experimental design to black-box model analysis. CUBE evaluates a trained predictor on balanced low--high probe combinations and summarizes the responses as factorial effects. Main effects and pairwise interactions are interpreted as controlled contrasts on a specified explanation region. Complete factorial probes identify these effects exactly on the selected design space, while fractional probes reduce query cost and expose aliasing and resolution constraints. Experiments on synthetic and real tabular tasks show that CUBE recovers dominant learned effect structure and clarifies the identifiability limits of query-efficient explanations.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-05-18