Post-hoc gradient-based interpretability methods [1, 2] that provide instancespecific explanations of model predictions are often based on assumption (A): magnitude of input gradients--gradients of logits with respect to input--noisily highlight discriminative task-relevant features. In this work, we test the validity of assumption (A) using a three-pronged approach: 1. We develop an evaluation framework, DiffROAR, to test assumption (A) on four image classification benchmarks. Our results suggest that (i) input gradients of standard models (i.e., trained on original data) may grossly violate (A), whereas (ii) input gradients of adversarially robust models satisfy (A) reasonably well.

Tabular data (or tables) are the most widely used data format in machine learning (ML). However, ML models often assume the table structure keeps fixed in training and testing. Before ML modeling, heavy data cleaning is required to merge disparate tables with different columns.

In the Supplementary materials, we include detailed descriptions on convex surrogate losses,convolutional neural networks, non-asymptotic error bounds for commonly used loss functions, and prove Theorems 2.1,2.2, A toy example on the numerical performance of CNN approximation is presented in Appendix D. We next give a brief review of the convex surrogate loss functions and discuss in details on the connection between the excess risk with respect to the ϕ-loss and that of 0-1 loss [28, 4]. Let ϕbe a given convex univariate function ϕ: R [0,). Instead of minimizing the excess risk R over H, we consider minimizing the risk with respect to the loss ϕ(ϕ-risk) R(f):= E{ϕ(Yf(X))} over a certain class of functions F, where ϕ: R [0,) is some generic loss function. For the special case when H = {h: h(x) = sign(f(x)),f F} and ϕ() is a step function, i.e., ϕ(x) = 1 Guohao Shen and Yuling Jiao contributed equally to this work Corresponding authors 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022). As shown in [28] and [4], for a properly chosen ϕ, ˆfn can indeed help reduce the 0-1 excess risk R (ˆhn) R (h0). More precisely, let R0:= inff measurable R(f), then for a proper ϕ, we have ψ(R (ˆhn) R (h0)) R(ˆfn) R(f0), where ψ: [ 1,1] [0,)is a nonnegative continuous function, invertible on [0,1], and achieves its minimum at 0 with ψ(0) = 0. A wide variety of popular classification methods are based on this tactic.