From Baselines to Transport Geodesics: Axiomatic Attribution via Optimal Generative Flows

ArXi:2603.05093v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Feature attributions often hide a critical modeling choice: they explain a prediction along a counterfactual path from a reference state to an input. Different baselines, interpolations, and generative trajectories define different paths and can therefor produce different explanations. We study this path ambiguity as a modeling problem. Our central question is whether the path can be chosen by the data-generating transport process, rather than by a hand-designed interpolation or by the sensitivity geometry of the model being explained.