Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied in natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, researchers often claim that attention weights confer interpretability, purportedly useful both for providing insights to practitioners and for explaining why a model makes its decisions to stakeholders. We call the latter use of attention mechanisms into question, demonstrating a simple method for training models to produce deceptive attention masks, diminishing the total weight assigned to designated impermissible tokens, even as the models are shown to nevertheless rely on these features to drive predictions. Across multiple models and datasets, our approach manipulates attention weights while paying surprisingly little cost in accuracy. Although our results do not rule out potential insights due to organically-trained attention, they cast doubt on attention's reliability as a tool for auditing algorithms, as in the context of fairness and accountability.

本研究提出一种简单方法，通过训练模型生成欺骗性的注意力掩码，从而质疑注意机制的可靠性，因为通过操纵注意权重，即使我们可以证明模型仍然依赖这些特征来驱动预测，我们的方法会减少指定的不允许的标记被分配的总权重。通过人类研究，我们展示了我们操作注意力的解释会欺骗人们认为偏见的模型的预测不依赖性别，从而对注意力在公平性和问责制的算法审计工具上的可靠性产生怀疑。

基于注意力解释的欺骗学习