  Albeit the tremendous performance improvements in designing complex
artificial intelligence (AI) systems in data-intensive domains, the black-box
nature of these systems leads to the lack of trustworthiness. Post-hoc
interpretability methods explain the prediction of a black-box ML model for a
single instance, and such explanations are being leveraged by domain experts to
diagnose the underlying biases of these models. Despite their efficacy in
providing valuable insights, existing approaches fail to deliver consistent and
reliable explanations. In this paper, we propose an active learning-based
technique called UnRAvEL (Uncertainty driven Robust Active Learning Based
Locally Faithful Explanations), which consists of a novel acquisition function
that is locally faithful and uses uncertainty-driven sampling based on the
posterior distribution on the probabilistic locality using Gaussian process
regression(GPR). We present a theoretical analysis of UnRAvEL by treating it as
a local optimizer and analyzing its regret in terms of instantaneous regrets
over a global optimizer. We demonstrate the efficacy of the local samples
generated by UnRAvEL by incorporating different kernels such as the Matern and
linear kernels in GPR. Through a series of experiments, we show that UnRAvEL
outperforms the baselines with respect to stability and local fidelity on
several real-world models and datasets. We show that UnRAvEL is an efficient
surrogate dataset generator by deriving importance scores on this surrogate
dataset using sparse linear models. We also showcase the sample efficiency and
flexibility of the developed framework on the Imagenet dataset using a
pre-trained ResNet model.
