Linyi Li
2026
PR-XAI: PageRank-Based Feature Attribution for Transformers
Behrooz Azarkhalili | Linyi Li | Maxwell W. Libbrecht
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Behrooz Azarkhalili | Linyi Li | Maxwell W. Libbrecht
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
We introduce PR-XAI, a feature attribution method for transformer models based on the PageRank algorithm. The proposed PR-XAI models the attention mechanism as a directed graph, with weights derived from attention weights and their gradients. Evaluations across five well-known text classification datasets and three different architectures show that PR-AG, one variant of PR-XAI, outperforms state-of-the-art attribution methods in faithfulness and classification metrics, with significant gains on long-form text.