Categorical Explaining Functors: Ensuring Coherence in Logical Explanations

Post-hoc methods in Explainable AI (XAI) elucidate black-box models by identifying input features critical to the model’s decision-making. Recent advancements in these methods have facilitated the generation of logic-based explanations that capture interactions among input features. However, these techniques often encounter critical limitations, notably the inability to ensure logical consistency and fidelity between generated explanations and the model’s actual decision-making processes. Such inconsistencies jeopardize the reliability of explanations particularly in high-risk domains. To address this gap, we introduce a novel, theoretically rigorous approach rooted in category theory. Specifically, we propose the concept of an explaining functor, which preserves logical entailment structurally between the explanations and the decisions of black-box models. By establishing a categorical framework, our method guarantees the coherence and accuracy of extracted explanations, thus overcoming the common pitfalls associated with heuristic-based explanation methods. We demonstrate the practical efficacy of our theoretical contributions through two synthetic benchmarks that highlight significant reductions in contradictory and unfaithful explanations. Our experiments show how our framework can provide mathematically grounded, compositional, and coherent explanations.